The advantage, the luxury, as well as the torment and responsibility of the novelist, is that there is no limit to what he may attempt as an executant - no limit to his possible experiments, efforts, discoveries, successes.

There's no more usual basis of union than mutual misunderstanding.

People talk about the conscience, but it seems to me one must just bring it up to a certain point and leave it there. You can let your conscience alone if you're nice to the second housemaid.

His kiss was like white lightning, a flash that spread, and spread again, and stayed.

To criticize is to appreciate, to appropriate, to take intellectual possession, to establish in fine a relation with the criticized thing and to make it one's own.

She took refuge on the firm ground of fiction, through which indeed there curled the blue river of truth.

What is either a picture or a novel that is not character?