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

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

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.

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

I felt the beginning of a passion, hopeless in the long run, but very nourishing, for identifying myself with people who were not my own, and whose lives were governed by ideas alien to mine.

The makers of the short story have rarely been good novelists.