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

Our impulses are our birthright. To alter personality would be unjust, almost criminal, for the impulses that make a fool or worse of us in certain circumstances may be necessary for our happiness.

New York has always prided itself on its bad manners. That is the real source of our strength.

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.

A man is more than one being in his life. If the last persists, why not the first? If there be a hereafter for his age, why not for his youth?

... books are too heterogeneous an interest to furnish a vital one in life, a reason for being alive.

It is a pretty trick of authors to make nature ever in sympathy with man, but as a matter of fact she seldom is.