Any point of view is interesting that is a direct impression of life. You each have an impression colored by your individual conditions; make that into a picture, a picture framed by your own personal wisdom, your glimpse of the American world.

Ideas are, in truth, forces. Infinite, too, is the power of personality. A union of the two always makes history.

We care what happens to people only in proportion as we know what people are.

If the artist is necessarily sensitive, does that sensitiveness form in its essence a state constantly liable to shade off into the morbid? Does this liability, moreover, increase in proportion as the effort is great and the ambition intense?

She is like a revolving lighthouse; pitch darkness alternating with a dazzling brilliancy!

Autobiography may be the preeminent kind of American expression.

Criticism talks a good deal of nonsense, but even its nonsense is a useful force. It keeps the question of art before the world, insists upon its importance.