Critics have been amusing themselves for a long time by auscultating fiction for signs of heart failure.

giving the utmost of herself to three absorbing interests [marriage, motherhood, career] ... was a problem for a superwoman, and a job for a superwoman, and only some such fabled being could have accomplished it with success.

If the novel is dying, I see no chance that dismembering it will revive it.

Writing was a chimney for my blazing ambitions.

For what I have received may the Lord make me truly thankful. And more truly for what I have not received.

An intelligent man or woman willing to make a career of reviewing fiction is hard to come by ... And the temporaries do the work cheaply. Moreover, continuity may be got at the expense of intellectual arthritis; a reviewer who has been at his grisly task for half a lifetime may stiffen into prejudices of every sort, and become too anchylosed to do better than turn his back to a new wave when it rushes down on him.

Failures to love are irremediable and irredeemable.