Biographers, by their very nature, want to know everything about everybody, dead or alive.

There is a marvelous turn and trick to British arrogance; its apparent unconsciousness makes it twice as effectual.

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.

For your born writer, nothing is so healing as the realization that he has come upon the right word.

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

It is a great, a pleasant thing to have a friend with whom to walk, untroubled, through the woods, by the stream, saying nothing, at peace--the heart all clean and quiet and empty, ready for the spirit that may choose to be its guest.

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.