Authors are far closer to the truths enfolded in mystery than ordinary people, because of that very audacity of imagination which irritates their plodding critics. As only those who dare to make mistakes succeed greatly, only those who shake free the wings of their imagination brush, once in a way, the secrets of the great pale world. If such writers go wrong, it is not for the mere brains to tell them so

It is seldom that the imagination is disappointed in the 'ancestral piles' of England.

Never trust a woman who will not lie about her age after thirty. She is unwomanly and unhuman and there is no knowing what crimes she will commit.

Here is a simple recipe to begin with. Get up every morning with the set intention of writing and go to your desk and sit there for three hours, whether you accomplish anything or not. Before long you will find that you are writing madly, not waiting for inspiration.

Nowhere can it rain harder and with a more tiresome persistence than in California during the brief season when it rains at all.

To put a tempting face aside when duty demands every faculty is a lesson which takes most men longest to learn.

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.