Criticism changes with the fashion of the time. A story is always a story.

Like many popular best-sellers, he was a very sad and solemn man who took himself too seriously and his art not seriously enough.

On one plane, the very great writers and the popular romancers of the lower order always meet. They use all of themselves, helplessly, unselectively. They are above the primness and good taste of declining to give themselves away.

One recalls how much the creative impulse of the best-sellers depends upon self-pity. It is an emotion of great dramatic potential.

All writers - all people - have their stores of private and family legends which lie like a collection of half-forgotten, often violent toys on the floor of memory.

The wrongs of childhood and upbringing have made a large and obsessional contribution to autobiography and the novel.

Well, youth is the period of assumed personalities and disguises. It is the time of the sincerely insincere.