The truth is I've got the land on my back, an' it's drivin' me. Land is a hard driver.

it is wiser to be conventionally immoral than unconventionally moral. It isn't the immorality they object to, but the originality.

All change is not growth, as all movement is not forward.

... 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 me, the novel is experience illumined by imagination.

What fools people are when they think they can make two lives belong together by saying words over them.

There is in every human being, I think, a native country of the mind, where, protected by inaccessible barriers, the sensitive dream life may exist safely.