What is it with me? Am I absolutely nobody, but merely inordinately vain? I do not know…. But I am most fearfully unhappy. That is all. I am so unhappy that I wish I was dead—yet I should be mad to die when I have not yet lived at all.

What do you want most to do? That's what I have to keep asking myself, in the face of difficulties.

When we begin to take our failures non-seriously, it means we are ceasing to be afraid of them.

There is no feeling to be compared with the feeling of having written and finished a story.

Oh, impossible. Fancy cream puffs so soon after breakfast. The very idea made one shudder. All the same, two minutes later Jose and Laura were licking their fingers with that absorbed inward look that only comes from whipped cream.

I am a recluse at present & do nothing but write & read & read & write

conversation is like a dear little baby that is brought in to be handed round. You must rock it, nurse it, keep it on the move if you want it to keep smiling.