He said he judged people by their characters. I said was that always a quite good way of judging, as people's characters get so different at times, as it depends so much what happens to them.

Characters are not created by writers. They pre-exist and have to be found.

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.

Some people are molded by their admirations, others by their hostilities.

Characters should on the whole, be under rather than over articulate. What they intend to say should be more evident, more striking (because of its greater inner importance to the plot) than what they arrive at saying.

Meetings that do not come off keep a character of their own. They stay as they were projected.