fiction is not only the historian of life but its apologist.

[Alexander] Hamilton estimated portrait painters as thieves of time.

In times of panic man seems to exchange his soul for a tail.

Plot and melodrama were in every life; in some so briefly as hardly to be recognized, in others-in that of certain men and women in the public eye, for instance-they were almost in the nature of a continuous performance.

stoicism is the fundamental characteristic of the French.

Writing was my real life and I was more at home with the people of my imagination than with the best I met in the objective world.

It is a pretty trick of authors to make nature ever in sympathy with man, but as a matter of fact she seldom is.