Spoilt Pleasure Is A Sad, Unseemly Thing;

Who Is Ever Adequate? We All Create Situations Each Other Can't Live Up To, Then Break Our Hearts At Them Because They Don't.

... 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.

Never To Lie Is To Have No Lock On Your Door, You Are Never Wholly Alone.

Dialogue Must Appear Realistic Without Being So. Actual Realism-the Lifting, As It Were, Of Passages From A Stenographer's Take-down Of A 'real Life' Conversation-would Be Disruptive. Of What? Of The Illusion Of The Novel. In 'real Life' Everything Is Diluted; In The Novel Everything Is Condensed.

Princess Bibesco Delighted In A Semi-ideal World - A World Which, Though Having A Counterpart In Her Experience, Was To A Great Extent Brought Into Being By Her Own Temperament And, One Might Say, Flair.