Fiction is history, human history, or it is nothing.

In the empty immensity of earth, sky, and water, there she was, incomprehensible, firing into a continent.

Words, as is well known, are the great foes of reality. I have been for many years a teacher of languages. It is an occupation which at length becomes fatal to whatever share of imagination, observation, and insight an ordinary person may be heir to. To a teacher of languages there comes a time when the world is but a place of many words and man appears a mere talking animal not much more wonderful than a parrot.

I sit down religiously every morning, I sit down for eight hours every day - and the sitting down is all.

A task, any task, undertaken in an adventurous spirit acquires the merit of romance.

It is respectable to have no illusions, and safe, and profitable and dull.

Criticism, that fine flower of personal expression in the garden of letters.