In writing biography, fact and fiction shouldn't be mixed. And if they are, the fictional points should be printed in red ink, the facts printed in black ink.

If art has a purpose, it is to interpret life, reproduce it in fresh visions.

Artists often think they are going to die before their time. They seem to possess a heightened sense of the passing of the hours.

A woman's biography - with about eight famous historical exceptions - so often turns out to be the story of a man and the woman who helped his career.

What the writer needs is an empty day ahead.

Writing, I think, is not apart from living. Writing is a kind of double living. The writer experiences everything twice. Once in reality and once in that mirror which waits always before or behind.

Writers seldom choose as friends those self-contained characters who are never in trouble, never unhappy or ill, never make mistakes, and always count their change when it is handed to them.