The Novel Does Not Simply Recount Experience,

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

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.

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.

Young Girls Like The Excess Of Any Quality. Without Knowing, They Want To Suffer, To Suffer They Must Exaggerate; They Like To Have Loud Chords Struck On Them.

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.