Expectations are the most perilous form of dream, and when dreams do realise themselves it is in the waking world: the difference is subtly but often painfully felt.

I am dead against art's being self-expression. I see an inherent failure in any story which fails to detach itself from the author-detach itself in the sense that a well-blown soap-bubble detaches itself from the bowl of the blower's pipe and spherically takes off into the air as a new, whole, pure, iridescent world. Whereas the ill-blown bubble, as children know, timidly adheres to the bowl's lip, then either bursts or sinks flatly back again.

The passion of vanity has its own depths in the spirit, and is powerfully militant.

Meetings that do not come off keep a character of their own. They stay as they were projected.

... any fictionis bound to be transposed autobiography.

writers do not find subjects: subjects find them. There is not so much a search as a state of open susceptibility.

Fantasy is toxic: the private cruelty and the world war both have their start in the heated brain.