A short story is. . .frequently the celebration of character at bursting point.

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

Short stories can be rather stark and bare unless you put in the right details. Details make stories human, and the more human a story can be, the better.

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

The profoundly humorous writers are humorous because they are responsive to the hopeless, uncouth, concatenations of life.

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

Among the masked dandies of Edwardian comedy, Max Beerbohm is the most happily armored by a deep and almost innocent love of himself as a work of art.