I always write a story in one sitting.

You can't write about people out of textbooks, and you can't use jargon. You have to speak clearly and simply and purely in a language that a six-year-old child can understand; and yet have the meanings and the overtones of language, and the implications, that appeal to the highest intelligence.

I have not much interest in anyone's personal history after the tenth year, not even my own. Whatever one was going to be was all prepared before that.

There is no such thing as an exact synonym and no such thing as an unmixed motive.

Evil is dull, that is the worst of it.

Could she fall so low? No, there were limits, and she believed she still knew where some of them were.

What we need now is endless courage.