Someone to tell it to is one of the fundamental needs of human beings.

What I absorbed from autobiographies was not how to be great so much as the littleness of the great.

... no problem except old age ever vanquished my mother.

All is egotism. The only people whose mainspring is not egotism are the dead and perhaps idiots.

My mother is a good woman - a very good woman - and I am, I think, not quite all criminality, but we do not pull together. I am a piece of machinery which, not understanding, my mother winds up the wrong way, setting all the wheels of my composition going in creaking discord.

It is the highest form of culture and craftmanship in art to use local materials. That way you stand a chance of adding to culture. The other way you are in danger of merely imitating it.

Women can always think as much as they like, an' they could get up on a platform an' talk till they bust, as long as they didn't want the world to be made no better, an' they wouldn't be thought unwomanly. It's soon as a woman wants any practical good done that she is considered a unwomanly creature.