The most striking fault in work by young or beginning novelists, submitted for criticism, is irrelevance--due either to infatuation or indecision. To direct such an author's attention to the imperative of relevance is certainly the most useful--and possibly the only--help that can be given.

Habit, of which passion must be wary, may all the same be the sweetest part of love.

What's the matter with this country is the matter with the lot of us individually - our sense of personality is a sense of outrage.

The novel does not simply recount experience, it adds to experience.

After inside upheavals, it is important to fix on imperturbable things. Their imperturbableness, their air that nothing has happened renews our guarantee.

Plot is the knowing of destination.

Only in a house where one has learnt to be lonely does one have this solicitude for things. One's relation to them, the daily seeing or touching, begins to become love, and to lay one open to pain.