Writers do not find subjects; subjects find them.

to leap is not only to leap, it is to hit the ground somewhere.

To the sun Rome owes its underlying glow, and its air called golden - to me, more the yellow of white wine; like wine it raises agreeability to poetry.

Bring all your intelligence to bear on your beginning.

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.

There is no end to the violations committed by children on children, quietly talking alone.

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.