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

No one in the modern world is more lonely than the writer with a literary conscience.

I was always a feminist, for I liked intellectual revolt as much as I disliked physical violence. On the whole, I think women havelost something precious, but have gained, immeasurably, by the passing of the old order.

Given two tempers and the time, the ordinary marriage produces anarchy.

Youth is the period of harsh judgments, and a man seldom learns until he reaches thirty that human nature is made up not of simples, but of compounds.

Youth is the season of tragedy and despair. Youth is the time when one's whole life is entangled in a web of identity, in a perpetual maze of seeking and of finding, of passion and of disillusion, of vague longings and of nameless griefs, of pity that is a blade in the heart, and of 'all the little emptiness of love.

Pessimism is the affectation of youth, the reality of age.