You will write if you will write without thinking of the result in terms of a result, but think of the writing in terms of discovery, which is to say that creation must take place between the pen and the paper, not before in a thought or afterwards in a recasting... It will come if it is there and if you will let it come.

Anything one does every day is important and imposing and anywhere one lives is interesting and beautiful.

If everyone were not so indolent they would realise that beauty is beauty even when it is irritating and stimulating not only when it is accepted and classic.

There is no passion more dominant and instinctive in the human spirit than the need of the country to which one belongs.... The time comes when nothing in the world is so important as a breath of one's own particular climate. If it were one's last penny it would be used for that return passage.

More great Americans were failures than they were successes. They mostly spent their lives in not having a buyer for what they had for sale.

I am writing for myself and strangers. This is the only way that I can do it.

Writer or painter god-parents are notoriously unreliable. That is, there is certain before long to be a cooling of friendship.