I sat staring up at a shelf in my workroom from which thirty-one books identically dressed in neat dark green leather stared back at me with a sort of cold hostility like children who resent their parents. Don't stare at us like that! they said. Don't blame us if we didn't turn out to be the perfection you expected. We didn't ask to be brought into the world.

A woman can look both moral and exciting... if she also looks as if it was quite a struggle.

The writer is a writer because he cannot help it. It is a compulsion.

Funny, isn't it, how your whole life goes by while you think you're only planning the way you're going to live it?

Any piece of furniture, I don't care how beautiful it is, has got to be lived with, and kicked about, and rubbed down, and mistreated by servants, and repolished, and knocked around and dusted and sat on or slept in or eaten off of before it develops its real character ... A good deal like human beings.

Writers should be read but not seen. Rarely are they a winsome sight.

Being an old maid is like death by drowning, a really delightful sensation after you cease to struggle.