I want the concentration and the romance, and the worlds all glued together, fused, glowing: have no time to waste any more on prose.

We live in constant danger of coming apart. The mystery of why we do not always come apart is the animating tension of all art.

I mean it's the writing, not the being read, that excites me.

Besides, in this random miscellaneous company we may rub against some complete stranger who will, with luck, turn into the best friend we have in the world.

I'm fundamentally, I think, an outsider. I do my best work and feel most braced with my back to the wall. It's an odd feeling though, writing aginst the current: difficult entirely to disregard the current. Yet of course I shall.

If behind the erratic gunfire of the press the author felt that there was another kind of criticism, the opinion of people readingfor the love of reading, slowly and unprofessionally, and judging with great sympathy and yet with great severity, might this not improve the quality of his work? And if by our means books were to become stronger, richer, and more varied, that would be an end worth reaching.

Let us again pretend that life is a solid substance, shaped like a globe, which we turn about in our fingers. Let us pretend that we can make out a plain and logical story, so that when one matter is despatched—love for instance—we go on, in an orderly manner, to the next.