In a sense sickness is a place, more instructive than a long trip to Europe, and it's always a place where there's no company, where nobody can follow. Sickness before death is a very appropriate thing and I think those who don't have it miss one of God's mercies.

I use the grotesque the way I do because people are deaf and dumb and need help to see and hear.

You get a real person down there and his talking will take care of itself.

Far be it for me to have worked it out in any abstract way. I don't know why the bull and Mrs. May have to die, or why Mr. Fortune and Mary Fortune: I just feel in my bones that that is the way it has to be. If I had the abstraction first I don't suppose I would write the story.

I write any sort of rubbish which will cover the main outlines of the story, then I can begin to see it.

When I was six I had a chicken that walked backward and was in the Pathe News. I was in it too with the chicken. I was just there to assist the chicken but it was the high point in my life. Everything since has been anticlimax.

Those who have no absolute values cannot let the relative remain merely relative; they are always raising it to the level of the absolute.