“Fiction here is likely to contain more truth than fact.”

“Fiction must stick to facts, and the truer the facts the better the fiction — so we are told.”

“If woman had no existence save in the fiction written by men, one would imagine her a person of the utmost importance (...); as great as a man, some think even greater. But this is woman in fiction. In fact, as Professor Trevelyan points out [in his History of England], she was locked up, beaten and flung about the room.”

“to let the light of the world flood back-to say this has not happened!But why turn one's head hither and thither? This is the truth. This is fact.”

“Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners.”

“Yet it is the masculine values that prevail. Speaking crudely, football and sport are ‘important’; the worship of fashion, the buying of clothes ‘trivial’. And these values are inevitably transferred from life to fiction. This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room. A scene in a battle-field is more important than a scene in a shop — everywhere and much more subtly the difference of value persists.”

“The truth is, I often like women. I like their unconventionality. I like their completeness. I like their anonymity. ”