A cultivated style would be like a mask. Everybody knows it's a mask, and sooner or later you must show yourself -- or at least, you show yourself as someone who could not afford to show himself, and so created something to hide behind. You do not create a style. You work, and develop yourself; your style is an emanation from your own being. |
Experience is what really happens to you in the long run; the truth that finally overtakes you. |
Human life itself may be almost pure chaos, but the work of the artist is to take these handfuls of confusion and disparate things, things that seem to be irreconcilable, and put them together in a frame to give them some kind of shape and meaning. |
I have a great deal of religious symbolism in my stories because I have a very deep sense of religion and also I have religious training. And I suppose you don't say, "I'm going to have the flowering judas tree stand for betrayal, but of course it does. |
I have not much interest in anyone's personal history after the tenth year, not even my own. Whatever one was going to be was all prepared before that. |
I have not much interest in anyone's personal history after the tenth year, not even my own. Whatever one was going to be was all prepared before that. |
I shall try to tell the truth, but the result will be fiction. |
I was right not to be afraid of any thief but myself, who will end by leaving me nothing. |
It is such a relief to be told the truth |
It's a man's world, and you men can have it. |
Love must be learned, and learned again; there is no end to it. |
Most people won't realize that writing is a craft. You have to take your apprenticeship in it like anything else. |
One of the marks of a gift is to have the courage of it. |
Our being is subject to all the chances of life. There are so many things we are capable of, that we could be or do. The potentialities are so great that we never, any of us, are more than one-fourth fulfilled. |
Physical infidelity is the signal, the notice given, that all fidelities are undermined. |