"The primitive audience was an audience of shockheads, gaping round the campfire, fatigued with contending against the mammoth or the woolly rhinoceros, and only kept awake by suspense. What would happen next? The novelist droned on, and as soon as the audience guessed what happened next they either fell asleep or killed him."
"'I only saw her for five minutes, but it was worth it.' There you have both allegiances in a single sentence. And what the story does is to narrate the life in time. And what the entire novel does - if it is a good novel - is to include the life in values as well."
"Unlike the weaver of plots, the story-teller profits by ragged ends."
"...he [french critic Alain] asserts that each human being has two sides, appropriate to history and fiction. All that is observable in a man - that is to say, his actions and such of his spiritual existence as can be deduced from his actions - falls into the domain of history. But his romanceful or romantic side (a partie romanesque ou romantique) include 'the pure passions, that is to say, the dreams, joys, sorrows and self-communings which politeness or shame prevent him from mentioning'; and to express this side of human nature is one of the chief functions of the novel."
"So let us think of people as starting life with an experience they forget and ending it with one which they anticipate but cannot understand."
