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

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

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

The novel...creates a bemusing effect. The short story, on the other hand wakes the reader up. Not only that, it answers the primitive craving for art, the wit, paradox and beauty of shape, the longing to see a dramatic pattern and significance in our experience.

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

Detective stories are the art-for-art's sake of yawning Philistinism.

Absolute Evil is not the kingdom of hell. The inhabitants of hell are ourselves, i.e., those who pay our painful, embarrassing, humanistic duties to society and who are compromised by our intellectually dubious commitment to virtue, which can be defined by the perpetual smear-word of French polemic: the bourgeois. (Bourgeois equals humanist.) This word has long been anathema in France where categories are part of the ruling notion of logique. The word cannot be readily matched in England or America.