Pity the selfishness of lovers: it is brief, a forlorn hope; it is impossible.
As a novelist, I cannot occupy myself with "characters," or at any rate central ones, who lack panache, in one or another sense, who would be incapable of a major action or a major passion, or who have not a touch of the ambiguity, the ultimate unaccountability, the enlarging mistiness of persons "in history." History, as more austerely I now know it, is not romantic. But I am.
Imagination of my kind is most caught, most fired, most worked upon by the unfamiliar: I have thrivenon the changes and chances, the dislocations andcontrasts which have made up so much of my life.
Dress has never been at all a straightforward business: so much subterranean interest and complex feeling attaches to it. As a topic ... it has a flowery head but deep roots in the passion. On the subject of dress almost no one, for one or another reason, feels truly indifferent: if their own clothes do not concern them, somebody else's do. ... Ten minutes talk about clothes (except between perfect friends) tends to make everyone present either overbearing, guarded or touchy.
Sins cut boldly up through every class in society, but mere misdemeanours show a certain level in life.
...there must be something she wanted; and that therefore she was no lady.
No, it is not only our fate but our business to lose innocence, and once we have lost that, it is futile to attempt a picnic in Eden.
Each piece of dialogue MUST be "something happening". . .The "amusing" for its OWN sake should above all be censored. . .The functional use of dialogue for the plot must be the first thing in the writer's mind. Where functional usefulness cannot be established, dialogue must be left out.
every short story is an experiment - what one must ask is not only, did it come off, but was it, as an experiment, worth making?
When I read a story, I relive the moment from which it sprang. A scene burned itself into me, a building magnetized me, a mood orseason of Nature's penetrated me, history suddenly appeared to me in some tiny act, or a face had begun to haunt me before I glanced at it.
the process of reading is reciprocal; the book is no more than a formula, to be furnished out with images out of the reader's mind.
One can suffer a convulsion of one's entire nature, and, unless it makes some noise, no one notices. It's not just that we are incurious; we completely lack any sense of each other's existences.
very young people are true but not resounding instruments.
nobody ever dies of an indignity.
Revenge was a very wild kind of justice.
After inside upheavals, it is important to fix on imperturbable things. Their imperturbableness, their air that nothing has happened renews our guarantee.
Sacrificers are not the ones to pity. The ones to pity are those they sacrifice.
We desert those who desert us; we cannot afford to suffer; we must live how we can.
Writers do not find subjects; subjects find them.
Convention was our safeguard: could one have stronger?
Sport and death are the two great socializing factors in Ireland.
Bring all your intelligence to bear on your beginning.
We have really no absent friends.
History is not a book, arbitrarily divided into chapters, or a drama chopped into separate acts; it has flowed forward. Rome is a continuity, called 'eternal.' What has accumulated in this place acts on everyone, day and night, like an extra climate.
Curiosity in Rome is a form of courtesy.
Follow AzQuotes on Facebook, Twitter and Google+. Every day we present the best quotes! Improve yourself, find your inspiration, share with friends
or simply: