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.

The only real rival of love is Art, for that in itself is a deep personal passion, its function an act of creation, fed by some mysterious perversion of sex, and demanding all the imagination's activities.

... France is the genius among nations.

genius must ever be imperfect. Life is not long enough nor slow enough for both brain and character to grow side by side to superhuman proportions.

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

Men are not amusing during the shooting season; but, after all, my dear, men were not especially designed to amuse women.

California has all the beauties of youth as well as its idiocies and vices.