It was a perfect spring afternoon, and the air was filled with vague, roving scents, as if the earth exhaled the sweetness of hidden flowers.

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.

... to be "literary" appeared to my deluded innocence as an unending romance.

I would write of the universal, not the provincial, in human nature.... I would write of characters, not of characteristics.

To mourn was distressing, but to endeavor to mourn and fail was worse than distress.

... beauty, like ecstasy, has always been hostile to the commonplace. And the commonplace, under its popular label of the normal,has been the supreme authority for Homo sapiens since the days when he was probably arboreal.

for my own purpose, I defined the art of fiction as experience illuminated.