Spoilt pleasure is a sad, unseemly thing; you can only bury it.

The writer, unlike his non-writing adult friend, has no predisposed outlook; he seldom observes deliberately. He sees what he didnot intend to see; he remembers what does not seem wholly possible. Inattentive learner in the schoolroom of life, he keeps some faculty free to veer and wander. His is the roving eye.

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

I pity people who do not care for Society. They are poorer for the oblation they do not make.

... a novel survives because of its basic truthfulness, its having within it something general and universal, and a quality of imaginative perception which applies just as much now as it did in the fifty or hundred or two hundred years since the novel came to life.

Have not all poetic truths been already stated? The essence of a poetic truth is that no statement of it can be final.

[A writer] should try not to be too far, personally, below the level of his work.