if you don't keep and guard and mature your force, and above all, have time and quiet to perfect your work, you will be writing things not much better than you did five years ago. ... you must write to the human heart, the great consciousness that all humanity goes to make up. Otherwise what might be strength in a writer is only crudeness, and what might be insight is only observation; sentimemnt falls to sentimentality - you can write about life, but never write life itself.

Life was resumed, and anxious living blew away as if it had not been. I could not breathe deep enough or long enough. It was a return to happiness.

Don't scatter your fire! You are a prose writer: stick to your own tool!

we have these instincts which defy all our wisdom and for which we never can frame any laws. ... They are powers which are imperfectly developed in this life, but one cannot help the thought that the mystery of this world may be the commonplace of the next.

I've found that people who look at things as they are, and not as they wish them to be, are the ones who succeed.

Satisfaction, even after one has dined well, is not so interesting and eager a feeling as hunger.

Conversation's got to have some root in the past, or else you've got to explain every remark you make, an' it wears a person out.