Suspicion is like the rain. It falls on the just and on the unjust.

[The writer] wants both to do the best possible work and also to reach the largest possible audience. The result is a fairly normal condition of discouragement.

Every writer knows the terror of an unexpected success. How to carry on? How to repeat it?

From class consciousness to class hatred was but a step.

there is something shameful about the death of a play. It does not die with pity, but contempt. A book may fail, but who is there to know it? It dies and is buried, and is decently interred on the bookseller's shelf; but the play dies to laughter, to scorn and disdain.

every act of one's life is the unavoidable result of every act that has preceded it.

Of one thing the reader can be certain: the more easily anything reads, the harder it has been to write.