One feature about Los Angeles that I particularly love is the chance for association with all kinds of creative artists, a thing I never before have had. I certainly do love a number of the writers, the painters, the musicians, and the sculptors that I meet here. ... Next to the sunshine, I appreciate it the most of anything in California.

I write as the birds sing, because I must, and usually from the same source of inspiration.

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.

the occasional cries of a lost loon, strayed from its flock in northern migration, fill the swamp with sounds of wailing.

we know by the odour that occasionally we are visited by skunks, which are not poetic but very beautiful.

To my way of thinking and working, the greatest service a piece of fiction can do any reader is to force him to lay it down with a higher ideal of life than he had when he took it up.

I don't so much mind the falling, but I do seem to select the hardest spots to light on.