It Is Not Our Exalted Feelings, 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.

The Novelist's--any Writer's--object Is To Whittle Down His Meaning To The Exactest And Finest Possible Point. What, Of Course, Isfatal Is When He Does Not Know What He Does Mean: He Has No Point To Sharpen.

The Writer, Unlike His Non-writing Adult Friend, Has No Predisposed Outlook; He Seldom Observes Deliberately. He Sees What He Didnot Intend To See; He Remembers What Does Not Seem Wholly Possible. Inattentive Learner In The Schoolroom Of Life, He Keeps Some Faculty Free To Veer And Wander. His Is The Roving Eye.

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.

... It Appears To Me That Problems, Inherent In Any Writing, Loom Unduly Large When One Looks Ahead. Though Nothing Is Easy, Little Is Quite Impossible.