Knowledge, like experience, is valid in fiction only after it has dissolved and filtered down through the imagination into reality.

anger and jealousy are spasms of the nerves, not of the heart.

The pathos of life is worse than the tragedy.

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.

First, I was an idealist (that was early - fools are born, not made, you know); next I was a realist; now I am a pessimist, and, by Jove! if things get much worse I'll become a humorist.

I suppose I am a born novelist, for the things I imagine are more vital and vivid to me than the things I remember.

Only on the surface of things have I ever trod the beaten path. So long as I could keep from hurting anyone else, I have lived, as completely as it was possible, the life of my choice. I have been free. . . . I have done the work I wished to do for the sake of that work alone.