Ambition, if it were to be savored, let alone achieved, had to be rooted in possibility.

Wars may be fought by decent men, but they're not won by them.

[My father and his friends] believed in equality for women without troubling to acquire the basic domestic skills which would have made that equality possible.

If this were fiction, could even the most brilliant novelist contrive to make credible so short a period in which pride had been subdued and prejudice overcome?

In 1930s mysteries, all sorts of motives were credible which aren't credible today, especially motives of preventing guilty sexual secrets from coming out. Nowadays, people sell their guilty sexual secrets.

Authors always take rejection badly. They equate it with infanticide.

If our sex life were determined by our first youthful experiments, most of the world would be doomed to celibacy. In no area of human experience are human beings more convinced that something better can be had only if they persevere.