I have never read a line of Walt Whitman.

I consider calmly the question of how much evil I should need to kill off my finer feelings.

You may think me crude, and probably I am crude, but I am not so crude as I was, for I am clever enough to see that the girl of nineteen who thought herself a genius was only an unusual girl writing her heart out.

It is with pain that I read of the dire effects of my book upon the minds of young girls.

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.

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.