Let me but make a beginning, let me but strike the world in a vulnerable spot, and I can take it by storm.

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

There is really no right and wrong. I recognize no right and wrong.

Well, if I am not vulgar, neither is my book. I wrote myself. Suggestiveness is always vulgar. But truth never. My book is not even remotely suggestive. I call things by their names. That is all.

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

I want to write such things as compel the admiring acclamation of the world at large, such things as are written but once in years, things subtle but distinctly different from the books written every day.

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.