The story must spring from an impression or perception pressing enough to have made the writer write. It should magnetize the imagination and give pleasure.

...though one can be callous in Ireland one cannot be wholly opaque or material. An unearthly disturbance works in the spirit; reason can never reconcile one to life; nothing allays the wants one cannot explain.

...the power-loving temperament is more dangerous when it either prefers or is forced to operate in what is materially a void. Wehave everything to dread from the dispossessed.

Short of a small range of physical acts-a fight, murder, lovemaking-dialogue is the most vigorous and visible inter-action of which characters in a novel are capable. Speech is what characters do to each other.

We desert those who desert us; we cannot afford to suffer; we must live how we can.

Pity the selfishness of lovers: it is brief, a forlorn hope; it is impossible.

The child lives in the book; but just as much the book lives in the child.