The qualities of a second-rate writer can easily be defined, but a first-rate writer can only be experienced. It is just the thing... in him which escapes analysis that makes him first-rate.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
One realizes that human relationships are the tragic necessity of human life; that they can never be wholly satisfactory, that eve...ry ego is half the time greedily seeking them, and half the time pulling away from them. In those simple relationships of loving husband and wife, affectionate sisters, children and grandmother, there are innumerable shades of sweetness and anguish which make up the pattern of our lives day by day, though they are not down in the list of subjects from which the conventional novelist works.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Even in harmonious families there is this double life: the group life, which is the one we can observe in our neighbour's househol...d, and, underneath, another--secret and passionate and intense--which is the real life that stamps the faces and gives character to the voices of our friends. Always in his mind each member of these social units is escaping, running away, trying to break the net which circumstances and his own affections have woven about him.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Art, it seems to me, should simplify. That, indeed, is very nearly the whole of the higher artistic process; finding what conventi...ons of form and what detail one can do without and yet preserve the spirit of the whole--so that all that one has suppressed and cut away is there to the reader's consciousness as much as if it were in type on the page.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »