Adjectives are the sugar of literature and adverbs the salt.

The only obligation to which in advance we may hold a novel, without incurring the accusation of being arbitrary, is that it be interesting.

Autobiography may be the preeminent kind of American expression.

A swift carriage, of a dark night, rattling with four horses over roads that one can’t see--that’s my idea of happiness.

The artist is present in every page of every book from which he sought so assiduously to eliminate himself.

Young men of this class never do anything for themselves that they can get other people to do for them, and it is the infatuation, the devotion, the superstition of others that keeps them going. These others in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred are women.

To treat a big subject in the intensely summarized fashion demanded by an evening's traffic of the stage when the evening, freely clipped at each end, is reduced to two hours and a half, is a feat of which the difficulty looms large.