There wouldn't be half as much fun in the world if it weren't for children and men, and there ain't a mite of difference between them under the skins.

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.

it is wiser to be conventionally immoral than unconventionally moral. It isn't the immorality they object to, but the originality.

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

irony is an indispensable ingredient of the critical vision; it is the safest antidote to sentimental decay.

It seems to me that this is the true test for poetry: - that it should go beneath experience, as prose can never do, and awaken an apprehension of things we have never, and can never, know in the actuality.

A farmer's got to be born, same as a fool. You can't make a corn pone out of flour dough by the twistin' of it.