No one of the characters in my novels has originated, so far as I know, in real life. If anything, the contrary was the case: persons playing a part in my life--the first twenty years of it--had about them something semi-fictitious.

fashion seems to exist for an abstract person who is not you or me.

Nobody speaks the truth when there's something they must have.

[My early stories] are the work of a living writer whom I know in a sense, but can never meet.

Young girls like the excess of any quality. Without knowing, they want to suffer, to suffer they must exaggerate; they like to have loud chords struck on them.

I think the main thing, don't you, is to keep the show on the road.

Art, at any rate in a novel, must be indissolubly linked with craft.