there's no art but has some business to it and no business but some art.

Perhaps after all the most breathtaking quality about San Francisco is these unexpected glimpses that you are always getting of beautiful hill-heights and beautiful valley-depths. ... City lights, like nests of diamonds, glitter and glisten in the depths of those valleys.

Genius is a good deal like the sea ... Nothing can restrain its tide or quicken it.

with a country of rare picturesqueness for a background, a people of rare beauty for actors, everybody more or less permeated with the artistic instinct and everybody more or less writing poetry - California has a pageant for breakfast, a fiesta for luncheon and a carnival for dinner. They are always electing queens. In fact any girl in California who hasn't been a queen of something before she's twenty-one is a poor prune.

It is a racking thing to have a plague of ideas and no chance to get rid of them on paper. I've nearly gone mad at times.

California, where the spring comes in the fall and the fall comes in the summer and the summer comes in the winter and the winter never comes at all.

A green Christmas makes a fat graveyard.