love of truth, ordinary common truth recognizable to everyone, is the ruling passion of the novel.

If one means by style the voice, the irreducible and always recognizable and alive thing, then of course style is really everything.

Illiteracy at the poverty level (mainly a matter of bad grammar) does not alarm me nearly as much as the illiteracy of the well-to-do.

Every age has a keyhole to which its eye is pasted. Spicy court-memoirs, the lives of gallant ladies, recollections of an ex-nun, a monk's confession, an atheist's repentance, true-to-life accounts of prostitution and bastardy gave our ancestors a penny peep into the forbidden room.

Life for the European is a career; for the American it is a hazard.

Maybe any action becomes cowardly once you stop to reason about it.

My occupational hazard is that I can't help plagiarizing from real life.