it takes the very wisest person there is to know when to talk, and when to keep still.

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.

What you are lies with you. 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, among the only ones who live beyond the grave in this world, the people who write books that help, make exquisite music, carve statues, paint pictures, and work for others. Never mind the calico dress, and the coarse shoes. Work at you books, and before long you will hear yesterday's tormentors boasting that they were once classmates of yours.

The wages of sin are the hardest debts on earth to pay, and they are always collected at inconvenient times and unexpected places.

I do not believe there is any one study that can be taken up that will broaden the imagination, that will be the source from which will spring more deep thinking and sincere research than the study of astronomy.

The world is full of happy people but no one ever hears of them. You have to fight and make a scandal to get in the papers. No one knows about all the happy people.

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.