However great one's gift of language may be, there is always something that one cannot tell.

Just why I sent it to the publishers would be hard to say, but when I had finished it I felt that it was literature, because it is real and because it was well written. And I know that the world wants such things.

I can think of nothing in the world like the utter littleness, the paltriness, the contemptibleness, the degradation, of the woman who is tied down under a roof with a man who is really nothing to her; who wears the man’s name, who bears the man’s children — who plays the virtuous woman. . . . May I never, I say, become that abnormal merciless animal, that deformed monstrosity — a virtuous woman.

One must always say things that aim to interest, because in the world one must after all pay for one's keep.

A genius who does not know that he is a genius is no genius.

May I never, I say, become that abnormal, merciless animal, that deformed monstrosity - a virtuous woman.

When I was three years old I was taken with my family to a little town in Western Minnesota, where I lived a more or less vapid and ordinary life until I was ten.