Autobiography may be the preeminent kind of American expression.

One doesn't defend one's god: one's god is in himself a defense.

We trust to novels to train us in the practice of great indignations and great generosity.

The main object of the novel is to represent life. . .The success of a work of art, to my mind, may be measured by the degree to which it produces a certain illusion; that illusion makes it appear to us for the time that we have lived another life - that we have had a miraculous enlargement of experience.

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

People can be in general pretty well trusted, of course--with the clock of their freedom ticking as loud as it seems to do here--to keep an eye on the fleeting hour.

I don't want everyone to like me; I should think less of myself if some people did.