The attraction of horror is a mental, or even an intellectual, excitement, but the fascination of the repulsive, so noticeable incontemporary writing, can spring openly from some rotted substance within our civilization.

Some women enjoy unhappy love affairs, you know, though I have always felt that they are greatly overrated.

I am inclined to believe that a man may be free to do anything he pleases if only he will accept responsibility for whatever he does.

As far back as I remember, long before I could write, I had played at making stories. But not until I was seven or more, did I begin to pray every night, "O God, let me write books! Please, God, let me write books!"

In the past few years, I have made a thrilling discovery ... that until one is over sixty, one can never really learn the secret of living. One can then begin to live, not simply with the intense part of oneself, but with one's entire being.

The surest way of winning love is to look as if you didn't need it.

When this immediate evil power has been defeated, we shall not yet have won the long battle with the elemental barbarities. Another Hitler, it may be an invisible adversary, will attempt, again, and yet again, to destroy our frail civilization. Is it true, I wonder, that the only way to escape a war is to be in it? When one is a part of an actuality does the imagination find a release?