We Have Really No Absent Friends.

Grown-up People Seem To Be Busy By Clockwork... They Run Their Unswerving Course From Object To Object, Directed By Some Mysterious Inner Needle That Points All The Time To What They Must Do Next. You Can Only Marvel At Such Misuse Of Time.

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.

Only In A House Where One Has Learnt To Be Lonely Does One Have This Solicitude For Things. One's Relation To Them, The Daily Seeing Or Touching, Begins To Become Love, And To Lay One Open To Pain.

If A Theme Or Idea Is Too Near The Surface, The Novel Becomes Simply A Tract Illustrating An Idea.

Art Is One Thing That Can Go On Mattering Once It Has Stopped Hurting.