Tilling the fertile soil of man's vanity.

. . . this rage - I have never forgotten it - contained every anger, every revolt I had ever felt in my life - the way I felt when I saw the black dog hunted, the way I felt when I watched old Uncle Henry taken away to the almshouse, the way I felt whenever I had seen people or animals hurt for the pleasure or profit of others.

Passion alone could destroy passion. All the thinking in the world could not make so much as a dent in its surface.

I waited and worked, and watched the inferior exalted for nearly thirty years; and when recognition came at last, it was too late to alter events, or to make a difference in living.

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

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

... 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.