Writers do not find subjects; subjects find them.

Nothing, that is say no one, can be such an inexorable tour-conductor as one's own conscience or sense of duty, if one allows either the upper hand: the self-bullying that goes on in the name of sight-seeing is grievous.

Wariness had driven away poetry; from hesitating to feel came the moment when you no longer could.

Though not all reading children grow up to be writers, I take it that most creative writers must in their day have been reading children.

But complex people are never certain that they are not crooks, never certain their passports are quite in order, and are, therefore, unnerved by the slightest thing.

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

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.