My own feeling is that the only possible reason for engaging in the hard labor of writing a novel, is that one is bothered by something one needs to understand, and can come to understand only through the characters in the imagined situation.

One must think like a hero to behave like a merely decent human being.

People are always talking about the joys of youth-but, oh, how youth can suffer!

I sometimes think men don't 'hear' very well, if I take your meaning to be 'understand what is going on in a person.' That's what makes them so restful. Women wear each other out with their everlasting touching of the nerve.

I believe that children long for form just as grownups do, and that it releases rather than cramps creative energy.

Pain can make a whole winter bright, like fever, force us to live deep and hard.

Words are more powerful than perhaps anyone suspects, and once deeply engraved in a child's mind, they are not easily eradicated.