The Craft Of The Novelist Does Lie

... 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.

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

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.

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

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