It is only in the heart that anything really happens.

For me, the novel is experience illumined by imagination.

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

I don't like human nature, but I do like human beings.

Of one thing alone I am very sure: it is a law of our nature that the memory of longing should survive the more fugitive memory of fulfillment.

Although the primitive in art may be both interesting and impressive, as portrayed in American fiction it is conspicuous for dullness alone. Drab persons living drab lives, observed by drab minds and reported in drab writing.

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.