The tragic thing about learning from experience is I fear that one can only learn from one's own experience. Other people's - other nations' - experiences simply do not help. They can be imaginatively learned from. But people do not act on other people's experiences.

There is only one real deprivation... and that is not to be able to give one's gifts to those one loves most.

True feeling justifies whatever it may cost.

Without anxiety life would have very little savor.

A good marriage shuts out a very great deal.

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.

For after all we make our faces as we go along.