First Love, With Its Frantic Haughty Imagination,

To Walk Into History Is To Be Free At Once, To Be At Large Among People.

The Most Striking Fault In Work By Young Or Beginning Novelists, Submitted For Criticism, Is Irrelevance--due Either To Infatuation Or Indecision. To Direct Such An Author's Attention To The Imperative Of Relevance Is Certainly The Most Useful--and Possibly The Only--help That Can Be Given.

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.

People In Love, In Whom Every Sense Is Open, Cannot Beat Off The Influence Of A Place.

Fantasy Is Toxic: The Private Cruelty And The World War Both Have Their Start In The Heated Brain.