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 was a failure in Boston...because they thought I was too fashionable to be intelligent, and a failure in New York because they were afraid I was too intelligent to be fashionable.

A classic is classic not because it conforms to certain structural rules, or fits certain definitions (of which its author had quite probably never heard). It is classic because of a certain eternal and irrepressible freshness.

A frivolous society can acquire dramatic significance only through what its frivolity destroys.

To your generation, I must represent the literary equivalent of tufted furniture and gas chandeliers.

Her failure was a useful preliminary to success.

What Lily craved was the darkness made by enfolding arms, the silence which is not solitude, but compassion holding its breath.