A work of art is never finished. It is merely abandoned.

Suspense: the only literary tool that has any effect upon tyrants and savages.

A novel must give a sense of permanence as well as a sense of life.

It is now only in letters I write what I feel: not in literature any more, and I seldom say it, because I keep trying to be amusing.

The historian records, but the novelist creates.

The book [ A Passage to India ] shows signs of fatigue and disillusionment; but it has chapters of clear and triumphant beauty, and above all it makes us wonder, what will he write next?

I have always found writing pleasant and don't understand what people mean by 'throes of creation.'

The novel is a formidable mass, and it is so amorphous - no mountain in it to climb, no Parnassus or Helicon, not even a Pisgah. It is most distinctly one of the moister areas of literature - irrigated by a hundred rills and occasionally degenerating into a swamp. I do not wonder that the poets despise it, though they sometimes find themselves in it by accident. And I am not surprised at the annoyance of the historians when by accident it finds itself among them.

Expansion, that is the idea the novelist must cling to, not completion, not rounding off, but opening out.