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

Of poets I put Virgil first - he was greatest.

I do not sing nor play, but I adore music, particularly Chopin. I like him because I cannot understand him.

I read of the Kalamazoo girl who killed herself after reading the book. I am not at all surprised. She lived in Kalamazoo, for one thing, and then she read the book.

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 want to live quietly.

But in my life, in my personality, there is an essence of falseness and insincerity. A thin, fine vapor of fraud hangs always over me and dampens and injures some things in me that I value.