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

I know men and women. An honourable man is an honourable man, and a liar is a liar; both are born and not made. One cannot change to the other any more than that same old leopard can change its spots. After a man tells a woman the first untruth of that sort, the others come piling thick, fast, and mountain high.

There was an exquisitely beautiful conception in my brain when I did this piece of work all alone from midnight until morning after the experience of a wonderful day. But I was not able to make the consummation anywhere nearly as beautiful as the inspiration. That, I suppose, is the cry of every heart struggling for self-expression.

the friend in need is the one who is the friend in deed; ... if people were not friends in need, there was every likelihood that they never would be friends again in any conditions that might obtain.

Do you know that being a stranger is the hardest thing that can happen to any one in all this world?

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

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.