To read a novel is a difficult and complex art.

I am to be broken. I am to be derided all my life. I am to be cast up and down among these men and women, with their twitching faces, with their lying tongues, like a cork on a rough sea. Like a ribbon of weed I am flung far every time the door opens.

Facts must be manipulated; some must be brightened; others shaded; yet, in the process, they must never lose their integrity.

The art of writing has for backbone some fierce attachment to an idea.

I don't believe that you can possibly separate expression from thought in an imaginative work. The better a thing is expressed, the more completely it is thought.

I see through most people; I'm hardly ever wrong. I see at once what they've got in them.

for it was not knowledge but unity that she desired, not inscriptions on tablets, nothing that could be written in any language known to men, but intimacy itself, which is knowledge