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.

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

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.

What pioneer ever had chart and a lighthouse to steer by?

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

One of the marks of true genius is a quality of abundance. A rich, rollicking abundance, enough to give indigestion to ordinary people. Great artists turn it out in rolls, in swatches. They cover whole ceilings with paintings, they chip out a mountainside in stone, they write not one novel but a shelf full. It follows that some of their work is better than other. As much as a third of it may be pretty bad. Shall we say this unevenness is the mark of their humanity - of their proud mortality as well as of their immortality?

People who carry a musical soul about them are, I think, more receptive than others. They smile more readily. One feels in them a pleasant propensity toward the lesser sins, a pleasing readiness also to admit the possibility that on occasion they may be in the wrong--they may be mistaken.