Dialogue should show the relationships among people.

Experience isn't interesting until it begins to repeat itself. In fact, till it does that, it hardly is experience.

Love of privacy - perhaps because of the increasing exactions of society - has become in many people almost pathological.

memory is to love what the saucer is to the cup.

Each of us keeps, battened down inside himself, a sort of lunatic giant; impossible socially, but full scale; and it's the knockings and battering we sometimes hear in each other that keep our banter from utter banality.

... in nine out of ten cases the original wish to write is the wish to make oneself felt[ellipsis in source] the non-essential writer never gets past that wish.

The heart may think it knows better: the senses know that absence blots people out. We really have no absent friends.