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.

For me, the novel is experience illumined by imagination.

... in the nineteen-thirties ... the most casual reader of murder mysteries could infallibly detect the villain, as soon as there entered a character who had recently washed his neck and did not commit mayhem on the English language.

True goodness is an inward grace, not an outward necessity.

Energy had fastened upon her like a disease.

I ain't never seen no head so level that it could bear the lettin' in of politics.

My first reading of Tolstoy affected me as a revelation from heaven, as the trumpet of the judgment. What he made me feel was notthe desire to imitate, but the conviction that imitation was futile.