Jane, I never meant to wound you thus...Will you ever forgive me?" Reader, I forgave him at the moment and on the spot.

The writer who possesses the creative gift owns something of which he is not always master - something that, at times, strangely wills and works for itself.

Self abandoned, relaxed and effortless, I seemed to have laid me down in the dried-up bed of a great river; I heard a flood loosened in remote mountains, I felt the torrent come; to rise I had no will, to flee I had no strength.

Nervous alarms should always be communicated, that they may be dissipated.

Give him enough rope and he will hang himself.

A new chapter in a novel is something like a new scene in a play.

No reflection was to be allowed now, not one glance was to be cast back; not even one forward. Not one thought was to be given either to the past or the future. The first was a page so heavenly sweet, so deadly sad, that to read one line of it would dissolve my courage and break down my energy. The last was an awful blank, something like then world when the deluge was gone by.