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.

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.

A touch of science, even bogus science, gives an edge to the superstitious tale.

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

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.

Now, practically all reviewers have academic aspirations. The people from the universities are used to a captive audience, but the literary journalist has to please his audience.

Sooner or later, the great men turn out to be all alike. They never stop working. They never lose a minute. It is very depressing.