I want books written out of a brain and heart and soul crowded and vital with Life, spelled with a big L. I want poetry bursting with passion. I don't care a hang for the 'verbal felicities.' They'll do for the fringe, but I want the garment to warm me first.

No matter how hard a man may labor, some woman is always in the background of his mind. She is the one reward of virtue.

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.

orthodoxy is a fixed habit of mind. The average man and woman hug their orthodoxies and spit their venom on those that outrage them.

A long while ago an eager group of reformers wrote to me asking if I could suggest anything that would improve the morals of the American people. I replied that the trouble with the American people in general was not lack of morals but lack of brains.

The grief of childhood is terrible while it lasts, it is so abandoned and so all-possessing.

the best of all good friends is pride.