Writing has nothing to do with communication between person and person, only with communication between different parts of a person's mind.

Did St. Francis preach to the birds? Whatever for? If he really liked birds he would have done better to preach to the cats.

Nobody ever wrote a good book simply by collecting a number of accurate facts and valid ideas.

There are acacias, a graceful species amusingly devitalized by sentimentality, this kind drooping its leaves with the grace of a young widow bowed in controllable grief, this one obscuring them with a smooth silver as of placid tears. They please, like the minor French novelists of the eighteenth century, by suggesting a universe in which nothing cuts deep.

No one can write a best-seller by taking thought. The slightest touch of insincerity blurs its appeal. The writer who keeps his tongue in his cheek, who knows that he is writing for fools and that, therefore, he had better write like a fool, makes a respectable living out of serials and novelettes; but he will never make the vast, the blaring, half a million success. That comes of blended sincerity and vitality.

Life ought to be a struggle of desire toward adventures whose nobility will fertilize the soul.

It would be no loss to the world if most of the writers now writing had been strangled at birth.