If you create a character, you create a destiny.

We can talk frankly about our defects only to those who recognise our qualities.

In literature as in love, we are astonished at what is chosen by others.

If men could regard the events of their own lives with more open minds, they would frequently discover that they did not really desire the things they failed to obtain.

Without a family, man, alone in the world, trembles with the cold.

The need to express oneself in writing springs from a mal-adjustment to life, or from an inner conflict which the adolescent (or the grown man) cannot resolve in action. Those to whom action comes as easily as breathing rarely feel the need to break loose from the real, to rise above, and describe it... I do not mean that it is enough to be maladjusted to become a great writer, but writing is, for some, a method of resolving a conflict, provided they have the necessary talent.

I knew a man who had been virtually drowned and then revived. He said that his death had not been painful.