I suppose I am a born novelist, for the things I imagine are more vital and vivid to me than the things I remember.

It is difficult to deal successfully, he decided, with a woman whose feelings cannot be hurt.

The hardest thing to believe when you're young is that people will fight to stay in a rut, but not to get out of one.

irony is an indispensable ingredient of the critical vision; it is the safest antidote to sentimental decay.

Surely one of the peculiar habits of circumstances is the way they follow, in their eternal recurrence, a single course. If an event happens once in a life, it may be depended upon to repeat later its general design.

Cruelty, I truly believe, is the one and only sin.

... to be "literary" appeared to my deluded innocence as an unending romance.