Dialogue In Fiction Is What Characters Do

Short Of A Small Range Of Physical Acts-a Fight, Murder, Lovemaking-dialogue Is The Most Vigorous And Visible Inter-action Of Which Characters In A Novel Are Capable. Speech Is What Characters Do To Each Other.

Art, At Any Rate In A Novel, Must Be Indissolubly Linked With Craft.

... A Novel Survives Because Of Its Basic Truthfulness, Its Having Within It Something General And Universal, And A Quality Of Imaginative Perception Which Applies Just As Much Now As It Did In The Fifty Or Hundred Or Two Hundred Years Since The Novel Came To Life.

The Novel Does Not Simply Recount Experience, It Adds To Experience.

For People Who Live On Expectations, To Face Up To Their Realization Is Something Of An Ordeal.