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.

What's the matter with this country is the matter with the lot of us individually - our sense of personality is a sense of outrage.

The novel does not simply recount experience, it adds to experience.

The innocent are so few that two of them seldom meet - when they do meet, their victims lie strewn all round.

in my experience one thing you don't learn from is anything anyone set up to be a lesson; what you are to know you pick up as you go along.

In 'real life' everything is diluted; in the novel everything is condensed.

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.