A farmer's got to be born, same as a fool. You can't make a corn pone out of flour dough by the twistin' of it.

After a day of rain the sun came out suddenly at five o'clock and threw a golden bar into the deep Victorian gloom of the front parlour

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

Conscience represents a fetich to which good people sacrifice their own happiness, bad people their neighbors'.

... the novel, as a living force, if not as a work of art, owes an incalculable debt to what we call, mistakenly, the new psychology, to Freud, in his earlier interpretations, and more truly, I think, to Jung.

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!"

It would appear, from the best examples, that the proper way of beginning a preface to one's work is with a humble apology for having written at all.