If you can't get the very best in this world, take nothing.

her age was that indeterminate mixture of everlasting youth and anticipated wisdom which is the glory and the curse of genius.

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

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

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

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.

power, after it has ceased from troubling, is the dominant passion in human nature.