It took me years to learn that character is fate and that no one can be made over.

The human mind has an infinite capacity for self-deception.

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.

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

I am a Californian, and we have twice the individuality and originality of any people in the United States. We always get quite huffy when we are spoken of as merely Americans.

the curse of human nature is imagination. When a long anticipated moment comes, we always find it pitched a note too low, for the wings of imagination are crushed into its withering sides under the crowding hordes of petty realities.