Stories are not chapters of novels. They should not be read one after another, as if they were meant to follow along. Read one. Shut the book. Read something else. Come back later. Stories can wait.

Like his father, like Jules Renard, he had been carried along the slow, steady swindle of history and experience.

There is a term for people caught on a street crossing after the light has changed: “pedestrian-traffic residue”.

It happened that at the late age of twenty-seven I had run away from home. High time, you might say; but rebels can’t always be choosers.

Converts have it soft,” said Mary. “They come to it late, without ever having had the Devil under the bed. They sail in and admire the stained-glass windows. All the dirty work has been done.

Like every other form of art, literature is no more and nothing less than a matter of life and death. The only question worth asking about a story – or a poem, or a piece of sculpture, or a new concert hall – is, Is it dead or alive?

A writer’s life stands in relation to his work as a house does to a garden, related but distinct.

All immigration is based on misapprehension.

The first flash of fiction arrives without words. It consists of a fixed image like a slide or closer still a freeze frame showing characters in a simple situation....

I wanted to live in Paris and write nothing but fiction and be perfectly free. I had decided all this had to be settled by the time I was thirty, and so I gave up my job and moved to Paris at twenty-eight. I just held my breath and jumped. I didn’t even look to see if there was water in the pool.