I could say that all my books were conceived by the time I was twenty, although they were not to be written for another thirty or forty years. But perhaps this is true of most writers—the emotional storage is done very early on.

Want of passion is, I think, a very striking characteristic of Americans, not unrelated to their predilection for violence. For very few people truly have a passionate desire to achieve, and violence serves as a kind of substitute.

the press is too often a distorting mirror, which deforms the people and events it represents, making them seem bigger or smaller than they really are.

All happiness is a form of innocence.

Everything turns out to be valuable that one does for one’s self without thought of profit.

This city belongs to ghosts, to murderers, to sleepwalkers. Where are you, in what bed, in what dream?

I have never seasoned a truth with the sauce of a lie in order to digest it more easily