The silence of a shut park does not sound like country silence: it is tense and confined.
Silences have a climax, when you have got to speak.
My writing, I am prepared to think, may be a substitute for something I have been born without - a so-called normal relation to society. My books are my relation to society.
Good general-purpose manners nowadays may be said to consist in knowing how much you can get away with.
The innocent are so few that two of them seldom meet - when they do meet, their victims lie strewn all round.
Solitary and farouche people don't have relationships; they are quite unrelatable.
Never to lie is to have no lock on your door, you are never wholly alone.
The craft of the novelist does lie first of all in story-telling.
without fiction, either life would be insufficient or the winds from the north would blow too cold.
one should discuss one's difficulties only when they are over.
Every love has a poetic relevance of its own; each love brings to light only what to it is relevant. Outside lies the junk-yard of what does not matter.
Silence sat in the taxi, as though a stranger had got in.
nothing is more restful than conformity.
Intimacies between women often go backwards, beginning in revelations and ending in small talk.
Proust has pointed out that the predisposition to love creates its own objects; is this not also true of fear?
No object is mysterious. The mystery is your eye.
Darling, I don't want you; I've got no place for you; I only want what you give. I don't want the whole of anyone.... What you want is the whole of me-isn't it, isn't it?-and the whole of me isn't there for anybody. In that full sense you want me I don't exist.
This, my first [bicycle] had an intrinsic beauty. And it opened for me an era of all but flying, which roads emptily crossing theairy, gold-gorsy Common enhanced. Nothing since has equalled that birdlike freedom.
Dialogue is the ideal means of showing what is between the characters. It crystallizes relationships. It should, ideally, be so effective as to make analysis or explanation of the relationships between the characters unnecessary.
Roughly, the action of a character should be unpredictable before it has been shown, inevitable when it has been shown. In the first half of a novel, the unpredictability should be the more striking. In the second half, the inevitability should be the more striking.
Language is a mixture of statement and evocation.
Young girls like the excess of any quality. Without knowing, they want to suffer, to suffer they must exaggerate; they like to have loud chords struck on them.
Though not all reading children grow up to be writers, I take it that most creative writers must in their day have been reading children.
What is being said is the effect of something that has happened; at the same time, what is being said is in itself something happening, which will, in turn, leave its effect.
[A writer] should try not to be too far, personally, below the level of his work.
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