...I had grown up in a world that was dominated by immature age. Not by vigorous immaturity, but by immaturity that was old and tired and prudent, that loved ritual and rubric, and was utterly wanting in curiosity about the new and the strange. Its era has passed away, and the world it made has crumbled around us. Its finest creation, a code of manners, has been ridiculed and discarded.

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

The hardest thing to believe when you're young is that people will fight to stay in a rut, but not to get out of one.

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

Nothingis so ungrateful as a rising generation; yet, if there is any faintest glimmer of light ahead of us in the present, itwas kindled by the intellectual fires that burned long before us.

to be honest and yet popular is almost as difficult in literature as it is in life.

Tilling the fertile soil of man's vanity.