When we define democracy now it must still be as a thing hoped for but not seen.

No writer, I believe, should attempt a novel before he is thirty, and not then unless he has been hopelessly and helplessly involved in life. For the writer who goes out to find material for a novel, as a fishermen goes out to sea to fish, will certainly not write a good novel. Life has to be lived thoughtlessly, unconsciously, at full tilt and for no purpose except its own sake before it becomes, eventually, good material for a novel.

If you start to revise before you've reached the end, you're likely to begin dawdling with the revisions and putting off the difficult task of writing.

From that house there has come so much life that it ought never to die or fall into ruin... For me that house was a gateway to America.

Anger can give energy to the mind but only if it is harnessed and held in control.

Now, five years is nothing in a man's life except when he is very young and very old... - Wang Lung

Religion was their meat and their excitement, their mental food and their emotional pleasure.