To drink for pleasure may be a distraction, but to drink from misery is always a danger.

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.

Nobody, not even the old, not even the despairing, wished to come to an end in time or in eternity.

Doesn't all experience crumble in the end to mere literary material?

The share of the sympathetic publisher in the author's success - the true success so different from the ephemeral - is apt to be overlooked in these blatant days, so it is just as well that some of us should keep it in mind.

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

Though it sounds absurd, it is true to say I felt younger at sixty than I felt at twenty.