The advantage, the luxury, as well as the torment and responsibility of the novelist, is that there is no limit to what he may attempt as an executant - no limit to his possible experiments, efforts, discoveries, successes.

That accurst autobiographic form which puts a premium on the loose, the improvised, the cheap, and the easy.

A tradition is kept alive only by something being added to it.

Live all you can; it's a mistake not to.

...he had long decided that abundant laughter should be the embellishment of the remainder of his days.

She had always been fond of history, and here [in Rome] was history in the stones of the street and the atoms of the sunshine.

One might enumerate the items of high civilization, as it exists in other countries, which are absent from the texture of American life, until it should become a wonder to know what was left.