The Short Story Is At An Advantage

With Three Or More People There Is Something Bold In The Air: Direct Things Get Said Which Would Frighten Two People Alone And Conscious Of Each Inch Of Their Nearness To One Another. To Be Three Is To Be In Public - You Feel Safe.

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.

The Story Must Spring From An Impression Or Perception Pressing Enough To Have Made The Writer Write. It Should Magnetize The Imagination And Give Pleasure.

The Heart May Think It Knows Better: The Senses Know That Absence Blots People Out. We Really Have No Absent Friends. The Friend Becomes A Traitor By Breaking, However Unwillingly Or Sadly, Out Of Our Own Zone: A Hard Judgment Is Passed On Him, For All The Pleas Of The Heart.

Knowledge Of Rome Must Be Physical, Sweated Into The System, Worked Up Into The Brain Through The Thinning Shoe-leather. ... When It Comes To Knowing, The Senses Are More Honest Than The Intelligence. Nothing Is More Real Than The First Wall You Lean Up Against Sobbing With Exhaustion. Rome No More Than Beheld (that Is, Taken In Through The Eyes Only) Could Still Be A Masterpiece In Cardboard - The Eye I Suppose Being Of All The Organs The Most Easily Infatuated And Then Jaded And So Tricked. Seeing Is Pleasure, But Not Knowledge.