Perhaps I should say that he held in contempt any facility that he may have had.

It was owing to his incomparable energy and Joblike patience that he ever gave us any fiction at all.

Every phrase in his fiction was, of all the myriad phrases he could think of, the fittest in his relentless judgment to survive.

Phrases, paragraphs, pages, whole stories even, were written over and over again.

He worked upon a principle of elimination.