It seems stupid to have discovered America only to make it into a copy of another country.

Dialogue in fiction should be reserved for the culminating moments and regarded as the spray into which the great wave of narrative breaks in curving towards the watcher on the shore.

I discovered early that crying makes my nose red, and the knowledge has helped me through several painful episodes.

One cares so little for the style in which one's praises are written.

The essence of taste is suitability. Divest the word of its prim and priggish implications, and see how it expresses the mysterious demand of the eye and mind for symmetry, harmony and order.

...and wondering where he had read that clever liars give details, but that the cleverest do not.

For what endless years this life will have to go on! He felt, with a kind of horror, his own strong youth and the bounding blood in his veins.