The function of the novelist... is to comment upon life as he sees it.

Fancy a novel about Chicago or Buffalo, let us say, or Nashville, Tennessee! There are just three big cities in the United States that are 'story cities'- New York, of course, New Orleans, and, best of the lot, San Francisco.

Evil is short lived. Never judge of the whole round of life by the mere segment you can see. The whole is, in the end, perfect.

No art that is not in the end understood by the People can live or ever did live a single generation.

No one to love, none to caress, Left all alone in this world's wilderness.

Truth is a thing immortal and perpetual, and it gives to us a beauty that fades not away in time.

[The Muse of our Fiction of the future] will lead you - if you are humble and honest with her - straight into a World of Working Men, crude of speech, swift of action, strong of passion, straight to the heart of a new life.