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

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

The peculiar foreign superstition that the English do not like love, the evidence being that they do not talk about it.

It is often said that in Ireland there is an excess of genius unsustained by talent; but there is talent in the tongues.

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 detective novel is the art-for-art's-sake of our yawning Philistinism, the classic example of a specialized form of art removed from contact with the life it pretends to build on.

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