How can you expect to be rescued if you don’t put first things first and act proper?

We're not savages. We're English.

When you take a child who's hollering like hell, sit him on your knee, and say "once upon a time", you stop him hollering. As long as you go on telling him a story, he will listen. Novelists who neglect this fundamental effect do so at their peril. They become what is known as the experimental novelist, and an experimental novel is not really a novel at all.

What could be safer than the bus center with its lamps and wheels?

We've got to have rules and obey them. After all, we're not savages. We're English, and the English are best at everything.

An orotundity, which I define as Nobelitis a pomposity in which one is treated as representative of more than oneself by someone conscious of representing more than himself.

However you disguise novels, they are always biographies.