I have watchedmany literary fashions shoot up and blossom, and then fade and drop.... Yet with the many that I have seen comeand go, I have never yet encountered a mode of thinking that regarded itself as simply a changing fashion, and not as an infallible approach to the right culture.

The attraction of horror is a mental, or even an intellectual, excitement, but the fascination of the repulsive, so noticeable incontemporary writing, can spring openly from some rotted substance within our civilization.

Pessimism is the affectation of youth, the reality of age.

I'm not going to lie down and let trouble walk over me.

the great novels have marched with the years. They are the contemporaries of time.

Conscience represents a fetich to which good people sacrifice their own happiness, bad people their neighbors'.

Cruelty, I truly believe, is the one and only sin.