I don't like human nature, but I do like human beings.

... in the nineteen-thirties ... the most casual reader of murder mysteries could infallibly detect the villain, as soon as there entered a character who had recently washed his neck and did not commit mayhem on the English language.

And where was happiness if it sprung not from the soil? Where contentment if it dwelt not near to Nature?

Mediocrity would always win by force of numbers, but it would win only more mediocrity.

1. Always wait between books for the springs to fill up and flow over. 2. Always preserve within a wild sanctuary, an inaccessible valley of reveries. 3. Always, and as far as it is possible, endeavor to touch life on every side; but keep the central vision of the mind, the inmost light, untouched and untouchable.

Violence commands both literature and life, and violence is always crude and distorted.

Tilling the fertile soil of man's vanity.