... in nine out of ten cases the original wish to write is the wish to make oneself felt ... [ellipsis in source] the non-essentia...l writer never gets past that wish.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The writer, unlike his non-writing adult friend, has no predisposed outlook; he seldom observes deliberately. He sees what he did ...not intend to see; he remembers what does not seem wholly possible. Inattentive learner in the schoolroom of life, he keeps some faculty free to veer and wander. His is the roving eye.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The writer, like a swimmer caught by an undertow, is borne in an unexpected direction. He is carried to a subject which has awaite...d 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.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Temperamentally, the writer exists on happenings, on contacts, conflicts, action and reaction, speed, pressure, tension. Were he a... contemplative purely, he would not write.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The short story is at an advantage over the novel, and can claim its nearer kinship to poetry, because it must be more concentrate...d, 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.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
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 wha...t? 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.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
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 or ...season 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.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... into the novel goes such taste as I have for rational behaviour and social portraiture. The short story, as I see it to be, al...lows for what is crazy about humanity: obstinacies, inordinate heroisms, "immortal longings."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »