If you are lazy, and accept your lot, you may live in it. If you are willing to work, you can write your name anywhere you choose.

We never know the timber of a man's soul until something cuts into him deeply and brings the grain out strong. You've the making of a mighty fine piece of furniture.

Being dead was one thing, getting ready for a wedding another.

My publishers will make any kind of a beautiful book I design and send in to them, but ... For poetry they have less use than a rooster would have for skates.

To my way of thinking and working, the greatest service a piece of fiction can do any reader is to leave him with a higher ideal of life than he had when he began. If in one small degree it shows him where he can be...gentler, saner, cleaner, kindlier...it is a wonder-working book. If it opens his eyes to one beauty in nature he never saw for himself and leads him one step toward the God of the Universe, it is a beneficial book.

You cannot write on the heart of another what you do not feel yourself.

no one in the whole world knows all a man's bignesses and all his littlenesses as his wife does.