It is less the business of the novelist to tell us what happened than to show how it happened.

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.

I shall never be as old as I was between 20 and 30.

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.

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.

It's very important to feel foreign. I was born in England, but when I'm being a writer, everyone in England is foreign to me.

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