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Writers Do Not Find Subjects; Subjects Find Them.

-Elizabeth Bowen

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Writers Do Not Find

Elizabeth Bowen

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Writers Do Not Find Subjects; Subjects Find Them.

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The Short Story Is At An Advantage Over The Novel, And Can Claim Its Nearer Kinship To Poetry, Because It Must Be More Concentrated, Can Be More Visionary, And Is Not Weighed Down (as The Novel Is Bound To Be) By Facts, Explanation, Or Analysis. I Do Not Mean To Say That The Short Story Is By Any Means Exempt From The Laws Of Narrative: It Must Observe Them, But On Its Own Terms.

Love Of Privacy - Perhaps Because Of The Increasing Exactions Of Society - Has Become In Many People Almost Pathological.

History Is Not A Book, Arbitrarily Divided Into Chapters, Or A Drama Chopped Into Separate Acts; It Has Flowed Forward. Rome Is A Continuity, Called 'eternal.' What Has Accumulated In This Place Acts On Everyone, Day And Night, Like An Extra Climate.

But In General, For The Purposes Of Most Novelists, The Number Of Objects Genuinely Necessary For. . .describing A Scene Will Be Found To Be Very Small.

We Can Surmount The Anger We Feel. To Find Oneself Like A Young Tree Inside A Tomb Is To Discover The Power To Crack The Tomb And Grow Up To Any Height.

To Leap Is Not Only To Leap, It Is To Hit The Ground Somewhere.

... In General, The Anglo-irish Do Not Make Good Dancers; They Are Too Spritely And Conscious; They Are Incapable Of One Kind Of Trance Or Of Being Seemingly Impersonal. And, For The Formal, Pure Dance They Lack The Formality: About Their Stylishness (for They Have Stylishness) There Is Something Impromptu, Slightly Disorderly.

Life Is A Succession Of Readjustments.

Reason Can Never Reconcile One To Life: Nothing Allays The Wants One Cannot Explain.

One Can Suffer A Convulsion Of One's Entire Nature, And, Unless It Makes Some Noise, No One Notices. It's Not Just That We Are Incurious; We Completely Lack Any Sense Of Each Other's Existences.

What Must Novel Dialogue . . . Really Be And Do? It Must Be Pointed, Intentional, Relevant. It Must Crystallize Situation. It Must Express Character. It Must Advance Plot. During Dialogue, The Characters Confront One Another. The Confrontation Is In Itself An Occasion. Each One Of These Occasions, Throughout The Novel, Is Unique.

Writers Do Not Find Subjects: Subjects Find Them. There Is Not So Much A Search As A State Of Open Susceptibility.

That Is Partly Why Women Marry - To Keep Up The Fiction Of Being In The Hub Of Things.

In 'real Life' Everything Is Diluted; In The Novel Everything Is Condensed.

Education Is Not So Important As People Think.

This, My First [bicycle] Had An Intrinsic Beauty. And It Opened For Me An Era Of All But Flying, Which Roads Emptily Crossing Theairy, Gold-gorsy Common Enhanced. Nothing Since Has Equalled That Birdlike Freedom.

My Writing, I Am Prepared To Think, May Be A Substitute For Something I Have Been Born Without - A So-called Normal Relation To Society. My Books Are My Relation To Society.

Solitary And Farouche People Don't Have Relationships; They Are Quite Unrelatable. If You And I Were Capable Of Being Altogether House-trained And Made Jolly, We Should Be Nicer People, But Not Writers.

One Should Discuss One's Difficulties Only When They Are Over.

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.

Bring All Your Intelligence To Bear On Your Beginning.

Curiosity In Rome Is A Form Of Courtesy.

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.

All My Life I Have Said, "whatever Happens There Will Always Be Tables And Chairs"--and What A Mistake.

Tables And Chairs

Almost Everybody Wore A Curious Limpidity Of Expression, Like Newborn Babies Or Souls Just After Death. Dazed But Curiously Dignified.... After A Criseof Hysterical Revulsion And Tiredness, I Passed Beyondand Became Entered By A Rather Sublime Feeling.

Sacrificers ... Are Not The Ones To Pity. The Ones To Pity Are Those That They Sacrifice. Oh, The Sacrificers, They Get It Both Ways. A Person Knows Themselves That They're Able To Do Without.

Intimacies Between Women Often Go Backwards, Beginning In Revelations And Ending In Small Talk.

I Pity People Who Do Not Care For Society. They Are Poorer For The Oblation They Do Not Make.

Nobody Can Be Kinder Than The Narcissist While You React To Life In His Own Terms.

The Wish To Lead Out One's Lover Must Be A Tribal Feeling; The Wish To Be Seen As Loved Is Part Of One's Self-respect.

What Is Being Said Is The Effect Of Something That Has Happened; At The Same Time, What Is Being Said Is In Itself Something Happening, Which Will, In Turn, Leave Its Effect.

The Slight Sense Of Degeneracy Induced By Reading Novels Before Luncheon

Often When I Write I Am Trying To Make Words Do The Work Of Line And Color. I Have The Painter's Sensitivity To Light. Much Of My Writing Is Verbal Painting.

Language Is A Mixture Of Statement And Evocation.

In My Experience One Thing You Don't Learn From Is Anything Anyone Set Up To Be A Lesson; What You Are To Know You Pick Up As You Go Along.

We Desert Those Who Desert Us; We Cannot Afford To Suffer; We Must Live How We Can.

After Inside Upheavals, It Is Important To Fix On Imperturbable Things. Their Imperturbableness, Their Air That Nothing Has Happened Renews Our Guarantee.

I Am Fully Intelligent Only When I Write. I Have A Certain Amount Of Small-change Intelligence, Which I Carry Round With Me As, At Any Rate In A Town, One Has To Carry Small Money, For The Needs Of The Day, The Non-writing Day. But It Seems To Me I Seldom Purely Think ... If I Thought More I Might Write Less.

I Am Dead Against Art's Being Self-expression. I See An Inherent Failure In Any Story Which Fails To Detach Itself From The Author-detach Itself In The Sense That A Well-blown Soap-bubble Detaches Itself From The Bowl Of The Blower's Pipe And Spherically Takes Off Into The Air As A New, Whole, Pure, Iridescent World. Whereas The Ill-blown Bubble, As Children Know, Timidly Adheres To The Bowl's Lip, Then Either Bursts Or Sinks Flatly Back Again.

Dialogue In Fiction Is What Characters Do To One Another.

I Suspect Victims; They Win In The Long Run.

Darling, I Don't Want You; I've Got No Place For You; I Only Want What You Give. I Don't Want The Whole Of Anyone.... What You Want Is The Whole Of Me-isn't It, Isn't It?-and The Whole Of Me Isn't There For Anybody. In That Full Sense You Want Me I Don't Exist.

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

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

Dress Has Never Been At All A Straightforward Business: So Much Subterranean Interest And Complex Feeling Attaches To It. As A Topic ... It Has A Flowery Head But Deep Roots In The Passion. On The Subject Of Dress Almost No One, For One Or Another Reason, Feels Truly Indifferent: If Their Own Clothes Do Not Concern Them, Somebody Else's Do. ... Ten Minutes Talk About Clothes (except Between Perfect Friends) Tends To Make Everyone Present Either Overbearing, Guarded Or Touchy.

There's Something So Showy About Desperation, It Takes Hard Wits To See It's A Grandiose Form Of Funk.

Illusions Are Art, For The Feeling Person, And It Is By Art That We Live, If We Do.

Expectations Are The Most Perilous Form Of Dream, And When Dreams Do Realise Themselves It Is In The Waking World: The Difference Is Subtly But Often Painfully Felt.

Good-byes Breed A Sort Of Distaste For Whomever You Say Good-bye To; This Hurts, You Feel, This Must Not Happen Again.

...there Must Be Something She Wanted; And That Therefore She Was No Lady.

Silences Can Be As Different As Sounds.

Each Piece Of Dialogue Must Be "something Happening". . .the "amusing" For Its Own Sake Should Above All Be Censored. . .the Functional Use Of Dialogue For The Plot Must Be The First Thing In The Writer's Mind. Where Functional Usefulness Cannot Be Established, Dialogue Must Be Left Out.

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

Fate Is Not An Eagle, It Creeps Like A Rat.

Proust Has Pointed Out That The Predisposition To Love Creates Its Own Objects; Is This Not Also True Of Fear?

Sport And Death Are The Two Great Socializing Factors In Ireland.

Silences Have A Climax, When You Have Got To Speak.

Children Like Change - For One Thing, They Never Anticipate Regret.

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

The Craft Of The Novelist Does Lie First Of All In Story-telling.

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 Most Steady, The Most Self-sufficient Nature Depends, More Than It Knows, On Its Few Chosen Stimuli.

Where Would The Irish Be Without Someone To Be Irish At?

Plot Is The Knowing Of Destination.

Some People Are Molded By Their Admirations, Others By Their Hostilities.

... 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.

The Paradox Of Romantic Love -- That What One Possesses, One Can No Longer Desire -- Was At Work.

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

Memory Is To Love What The Saucer Is To The Cup.

Revenge Was A Very Wild Kind Of Justice.

Nothing Arrives On Paper As It Started, And So Much Arrives That Never Started At All. To Write Is Always To Rave A Little-even If One Did Once Know What One Meant

Sins Cut Boldly Up Through Every Class In Society, But Mere Misdemeanours Show A Certain Level In Life.

...though One Can Be Callous In Ireland One Cannot Be Wholly Opaque Or Material. An Unearthly Disturbance Works In The Spirit; Reason Can Never Reconcile One To Life; Nothing Allays The Wants One Cannot Explain.

Every Love Has A Poetic Relevance Of Its Own; Each Love Brings To Light Only What To It Is Relevant. Outside Lies The Junk-yard Of What Does Not Matter.

A Romantic Man Often Feels More Uplifted With Two Women Than With One: His Love Seems To Hit The Ideal Mark Somewhere Between Two Different Faces.

Different Faces

Spoilt Pleasure Is A Sad, Unseemly Thing; You Can Only Bury It.

Fashion Seems To Exist For An Abstract Person Who Is Not You Or Me.

Everything Is Very Quiet, The Streets Are Never Crowded, And The People One Dislikes Are Out Of Town.

Raids Are Slightly Constipating.

I Think The Main Thing, Don't You, Is To Keep The Show On The Road.

A Novel Which Survives, Which Withstands And Outlives Time, Does Do Something More Than Merely Survive. It Does Not Stand Still. It Accumulates Round Itself The Understanding Of All These Persons Who Bring To It Something Of Their Own. It Acquires Associations, It Becomes A Form Of Experience In Itself, So That Two People Who Meet Can Often Make Friends, Find An Approach To Each Other, Because Of This One Great Common Experience They Have Had.

But Complex People Are Never Certain That They Are Not Crooks, Never Certain Their Passports Are Quite In Order, And Are, Therefore, Unnerved By The Slightest Thing.

Autumn Arrives In Early Morning, But Spring At The Close Of A Winter Day.

Jealousy Is No More Than Feeling Alone Against Smiling Enemies.

... Love Dreads Being Isolated, Being Left To Speak In A Void -- At The Beginning It Would Often Rather Listen Than Speak.

Certain Books Come To Meet Me, As Do People.

She Walked About With The Rather Fated Expression You See In Photographs Of Girls Who Have Subsequently Been Murdered, But Nothing Had So Far Happened To Her.

At The Age Of Twelve I Was Finding The World Too Small: It Appeared To Me Like A Dull, Trim Back Garden, In Which Only Trivial Games Could Be Played.

Habit Is Not Mere Subjugation, It Is A Tender Tie; When One Remembers Habit It Seems To Have Been Happiness.

Dialogue Should Show The Relationships Among People.

The Passion Of Vanity Has Its Own Depths In The Spirit, And Is Powerfully Militant.

We Are Minor In Everything But Our Passions.

The Silence Of A Shut Park Does Not Sound Like Country Silence: It Is Tense And Confined.

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

Writers Do Not Find Subjects; Subjects Find Them.

Characters Should On The Whole, Be Under Rather Than Over Articulate. What They Intend To Say Should Be More Evident, More Striking (because Of Its Greater Inner Importance To The Plot) Than What They Arrive At Saying.

Dialogue Should Convey A Sense Of Spontaneity But Eliminate The Repetitiveness Of Real Talk.

One Can Live In The Shadow Of An Idea Without Grasping It.

Mr. [aldous] Huxley Has Been The Alarming Young Man For A Long Time, A Sort Of Perpetual Clever Nephew Who Can Be Relied On To Flutter The Lunch Party. Whatever Will He Say Next? How Does He Think Of Those Things? He Has Been Deplored Once Or Twice, But Feeling Is In His Favor: He Is Steadily Read. He Is At Once The Truly Clever Person And The Stupid Person's Idea Of The Clever Person; He Is Expected To Be Relentless, To Administer Intellectual Shocks.

There Is No Doubt That Sorrow Brings One Down In The World. The Aristocratic Privilege Of Silence Belongs, You Soon Find Out, To Only The Happy State- Or, At Least, To The State When Pain Keeps Within Bounds.

Solitary And Farouche People Don't Have Relationships; They Are Quite Unrelatable.

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.

It Is Not Helpful To Help A Friend By Putting Coins In His Pockets When He Has Got Holes In His Pockets.

Autumn Arrives In The Early Morning.

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.

Each Of Us Keeps, Battened Down Inside Himself, A Sort Of Lunatic Giant; Impossible Socially, But Full Scale; And It's The Knockings And Battering We Sometimes Hear In Each Other That Keep Our Banter From Utter Banality.

No Object Is Mysterious. The Mystery Is Your Eye.

On The Subject Of Dress Almost No One, For One Or Another Reason, Feels Truly Indifferent: If Their Own Clothes Do Not Concern Them, Somebody Else's Do.

Nobody Speaks The Truth When There's Something They Must Have.

Yes, Writing A Novel, My Boy, Is Like Driving Pigs To Market - You Have One Of Them Making A Bolt Down The Wrong Lane; Another Won't Get Over The Right Stile.

[my Early Stories] Are The Work Of A Living Writer Whom I Know In A Sense, But Can Never Meet.

To The Sun Rome Owes Its Underlying Glow, And Its Air Called Golden - To Me, More The Yellow Of White Wine; Like Wine It Raises Agreeability To Poetry.

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.

Don't You Understand That All Language Is Dead Currency? How They Keep On Playing Shop With It All The Same.

The Importance To The Writer Of First Writing Must Be Out Of All Proportion Of The Actual Value Of What Is Written.

There Is No End To The Violations Committed By Children On Children, Quietly Talking Alone.

Pity The Selfishness Of Lovers: It Is Brief, A Forlorn Hope; It Is Impossible.

Without Fiction, Either Life Would Be Insufficient Or The Winds From The North Would Blow Too Cold.

Nothing, That Is Say No One, Can Be Such An Inexorable Tour-conductor As One's Own Conscience Or Sense Of Duty, If One Allows Either The Upper Hand: The Self-bullying That Goes On In The Name Of Sight-seeing Is Grievous.

I Do Like Italian Graves; They Look So Much More Lived In.

... Artists Were Intended To Be An Ornament To Society. As A Society In Themselves They Are Unthinkable.

Karen, Her Elbows Folded On The Deck-rail, Wanted To Share With Someone The Pleasure In Being Alone: This Is The Paradox Of Any Happy Solitude. She Had Never Landed At Cork, So This Hill And That Hill Beyond Were As Unexpected As Pictures At Which You Say "oh Look!" Nobody Was Beside Her To Share The Moment, Which Would Have Been Imperfect With Anyone Else There.

Nothing Is More Restful Than Conformity.

Someone Soon To Start On A Journey Is Always A Little Holy.

First Love, With Its Frantic Haughty Imagination, Swings Its Object Clear Of The Everyday, Over The Rut Of Living, Making Him All Looks, Silences, Gestures, Attitudes, A Burning Phrase With No Context.

Also, Perhaps Children Are Sterner Than Grown-up People In Their Refusal To Suffer, In Their Refusal, Even, To Feel At All.

The Heart May Think It Knows Better: The Senses Know That Absence Blots People Out. We Really Have No Absent Friends.

Long Distance Relationship

Though Not All Reading Children Grow Up To Be Writers, I Take It That Most Creative Writers Must In Their Day Have Been Reading Children.

It Is Not Our Exalted Feelings, It Is Our Sentiments That Build The Necessary Home.

Emotions Feelings

Wariness Had Driven Away Poetry; From Hesitating To Feel Came The Moment When You No Longer Could.

All Good Dialogue Perhaps Deals With Something Unprecedented.

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.

When I Read A Story, I Relive The Moment From Which It Sprang. A Scene Burned Itself Into Me, A Building Magnetized Me, A Mood Orseason Of Nature's Penetrated Me, History Suddenly Appeared To Me In Some Tiny Act, Or A Face Had Begun To Haunt Me Before I Glanced At It.

Live In The Moment

For People Who Live On Expectations, To Face Up To Their Realization Is Something Of An Ordeal.

Style Is The Thing That's Always A Bit Phony, And At The Same Time You Cannot Write Without Style.

... Any Fictionis Bound To Be Transposed Autobiography.

Art, At Any Rate In A Novel, Must Be Indissolubly Linked With Craft.

Silence Sat In The Taxi, As Though A Stranger Had Got In.

I Can't See Or Feel The Conflict Between Love And Religion. To Me, They're The Same Thing.

... 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.

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.

We Have Really No Absent Friends.

A Bowen, In The First Place, Made Bowen's Court. Since Then, With A Rather Alarming Sureness, Bowen's Court Has Made All The Succeeding Bowens.

Meetings That Do Not Come Off Keep A Character Of Their Own. They Stay As They Were Projected.

But To Be Quite Oneself One Must First Waste A Little Time.

The Writer, Like A Swimmer Caught By An Undertow, Is Borne In An Unexpected Direction. He Is Carried To A Subject Which Has Awaited Him--a Subject Sometimes No Part Of His Conscious Plan. Reality, The Reality Of Sensation, Has Accumulated Where It Was Least Sought. To Write Is To Be Captured--captured By Some Experience To Which One May Have Given Hardly A Thought.

Makes Of Men Date, Like Makes Of Car.

Jane Austen, Much In Advance Of Her Day, Was A Mistress Of The Use Of The Dialogue. She Used It As Dialogue Should Be Used-to Advance The Story; Not Only To Show The Characters, But To Advance.

What Is A Novel? I Say: An Invented Story. At The Same Time A Story Which, Though Invented Has The Power To Ring True. True To What? True To Life As The Reader Knows Life To Be Or, It May Be, Feels Life To Be. And I Mean The Adult, The Grown-up Reader. Such A Reader Has Outgrown Fairy Tales, And We Do Not Want The Fantastic And The Impossible. So I Say To You That A Novel Must Stand Up To The Adult Tests Of Reality.

Every Short Story Is An Experiment - What One Must Ask Is Not Only, Did It Come Off, But Was It, As An Experiment, Worth Making?

All Your Youth You Want To Have Your Greatness Taken For Granted; When You Find It Taken For Granted, You Are Unnerved.

Ghosts Seem Harder To Please Than We Are; It Is As Though They Haunted For Haunting’s Sake -- Much As We Relive, Brood, And Smoulder Over Our Pasts.

I Know That I Have In My Make-up Layers Of Synthetic Experiences, And That The Most Powerful Of My Memories Are Only Half True.

I Became, And Remain, My Characters' Close And Intent Watcher: Their Director, Never. Their Creator I Cannot Feel That I Was, Or Am.

Dialogue Is The Ideal Means Of Showing What Is Between The Characters. It Crystallizes Relationships. It Should, Ideally, Be So Effective As To Make Analysis Or Explanation Of The Relationships Between The Characters Unnecessary.

... In Nine Out Of Ten Cases The Original Wish To Write Is The Wish To Make Oneself Felt[ellipsis In Source] The Non-essential Writer Never Gets Past That Wish.

The Innocent Are So Few That Two Of Them Seldom Meet - When They Do Meet, Their Victims Lie Strewn All Round.

What's The Matter With This Country Is The Matter With The Lot Of Us Individually - Our Sense Of Personality Is A Sense Of Outrage.

Story Involves Action. Action Towards An End Not To Be Foreseen (by The Reader) But Also Towards An End Which, Having Been Reached, Must Be Seen To Have Been From The Start Inevitable.

Somehow At Parties At Which One Stays Standing Up One Seems To Require To Be More Concentratedly Intelligent Than One Does At Those At Which One Can Sit Down.

Ireland Is A Great Country To Die Or Be Married In.

Nothing Can Happen Nowhere. The Locale Of The Happening Always Colours The Happening, And Often, To A Degree, Shapes It.

Two Things Are Terrible In Childhood: Helplessness (being In Other People's Power) And Apprehension - The Apprehension That Something Is Being Concealed From Us Because It Is Too Bad To Be Told.

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.

The Best That An Individual Can Do Is To Concentrate On What He Or She Can Do, In The Course Of A Burning Effort To Do It Better.

But Surely Love Wouldn't Get So Much Talked About If There Were Not Something In It?

Nobody Ever Dies Of An Indignity.

Exhibitionism And A Nervous Wish For Concealment, For Anonymity, Thus Battle Inside The Buyer Of Any Piece Of Clothing.

The Irish Landowner, Partly From Laziness But Also From An Indifferent Delicacy, Does Not Interfere In The Lives Of The People Round. Sport And Death Are The Two Great Socializing Factors In Ireland, But These Cannot Operate The Whole Time: On The Whole, The Landowner Leaves His Tenants And Work-people To Make Their Own Mistakes, While He Makes His.

One's Sentiments -- Call Them That -- One's Fidelities Are So Instinctive That One Hardly Knows They Exist: Only When They Are Betrayed Or, Worse Still, When One Betrays Them Does One Realize Their Power.

The Novel Does Not Simply Recount Experience, It Adds To Experience.

Memory Must Be Patchy; What Is More Alarming Is Its Face-savingness. Something In One Shrinks From Catching It Out - Unique To Oneself, One's Own, One's Claim To Identity, It Implicates One's Identity In Its Fibbing.

Temperamentally, The Writer Exists On Happenings, On Contacts, Conflicts, Action And Reaction, Speed, Pressure, Tension. Were He Acontemplative Purely, He Would Not Write.

Sacrificers Are Not The Ones To Pity. The Ones To Pity Are Those They Sacrifice.

Good General-purpose Manners Nowadays May Be Said To Consist In Knowing How Much You Can Get Away With.

No, It Is Not Only Our Fate But Our Business To Lose Innocence, And Once We Have Lost That, It Is Futile To Attempt A Picnic In Eden.

Ghosts, We Hope, May Be Always With Us - That Is, Never Too Far Out Of The Reach Of Fancy. On The Whole, It Would Seem They Adapt Themselves Well, Perhaps Better Than We Do, To Changing World Conditions - They Enlarge Their Domain, Shift Their Hold On Our Nerves, And, Dispossessed Of One Habitat, Set Up House In Another. The Universal Battiness Of Our Century Looks Like Providing Them With A Propitious Climate.

No One Of The Characters In My Novels Has Originated, So Far As I Know, In Real Life. If Anything, The Contrary Was The Case: Persons Playing A Part In My Life--the First Twenty Years Of It--had About Them Something Semi-fictitious.

...the Power-loving Temperament Is More Dangerous When It Either Prefers Or Is Forced To Operate In What Is Materially A Void. Wehave Everything To Dread From The Dispossessed.

In Big Houses In Which Things Are Done Properly, There Is Always The Religious Element. The Diurnal Cycle Is Observed With More Feeling When There Are Servants To Do The Work.

If You Look At Life One Way, There Is Always Cause For Alarm.

Positive Attitude

With No Banal Reassuring Grown-ups Present, With Grown-up Intervention Taken Away, There Is No Limit To The Terror Strange Children Feel Of Each Other, A Terror Life Obscures But Never Ceases To Justify. There Is No End To The Violations Committed By Children On Children, Quietly Talking Alone.

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.

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.

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.

Rudeness To Mrs. Dosely Was Like Dropping A Pat Of Butter On To A Hot Plate - It Slid And Melted Away.

Meeting People Unlike Oneself Does Not Enlarge One's Outlook; It Only Confirms One's Idea That One Is Unique.

Dogs Are A Habit, I Think.

Art Is For [the Irish] Inseparable From Artifice: Of That, The Theatre Is The Home. Possibly, It Was England Made Me A Novelist.

Characters Are Not Created By Writers. They Pre-exist And Have To Be Found.

[a Writer] Should Try Not To Be Too Far, Personally, Below The Level Of His Work.

What I Have Found Is, Anything One Keeps Hidden Should Now And Then Be Hidden Somewhere Else.

When One Is A Child, The Disposition Of Objects, Tables And Chairs And Doors, Seems Part Of The Natural Order: A House-move Lets In Chaos - As It Does For A Dog.

Disappointment Tears The Bearable Film Off Life.

Some Ideas, Like Dandelions In Lawns, Strike Tenaciously: You May Pull Off The Top But The Root Remains, Drives Down Suckers And May Even Sprout Again.

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.

When You Love Someone All Your Saved Up Wishes Start Coming Out.

Very Young People Are True But Not Resounding Instruments.

Childish Fantasy, Like The Sheath Over The Bud, Not Only Protects But Curbs The Terrible Budding Spirit, Protects Not Only Innocence From The World, But The World From The Power Of Innocence.

Have Not All Poetic Truths Been Already Stated? The Essence Of A Poetic Truth Is That No Statement Of It Can Be Final.

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