Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one's luck.

I think one should pay so much attention to technique, don't you? Like learning to draw before you paint.

You understand nothing of—the horror—no wonder you can't write real books—you don't see—the horror—

Even as I write these words, which should be lucid and filled with glowing colour, I feel the very darkness of my own personality invading my pen. Only perhaps in the ink of this darkness can this writing properly be written? It is not really possible to write like an angel, though some of our near-gods by heaven-inspired trickery sometimes seem to do it.

Even if readers claim that they 'take it all with a grain of salt', they do not really. They yearn to believe, and they believe, because believing is easier than disbelieving, and because anything which is written down is likely to be 'true in a way'.

However one must ask not just, is it amusing, is it exciting, but is it a work of art?

It is necessary to write, that much is clear, and to write in a way quite unlike any way which I have employed before.

What dangerous machines letters are. Perhaps it is as well that they are going out of fashion. A letter can be endlessly reread and reinterpreted, it stirs imagination and fantasy, it persists, it is red-hot evidence. It was a long time since I had received anything resembling a love letter.

I struggled with a nebulous work which seemed now a nouvelle, now a vast novel, wherein a hero not unlike myself pursued, amid ghostly incidents, a series of reflections about life and art.