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

Ideas are, in truth, force.

It's time to start living the life you've imagined.

Make (the reader) think the evil, make him think it for himself, and you are released from weak specifications. My values are positively all blanks, save so far as an excited horror, a promoted pity, a created expertness... proceed to read into them more or less fantastic figures.

Her chief dread in life, at this period of her development, was that she would appear narrow minded; what she feared next afterwards was that she should be so.

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.

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