We're all of us guinea pigs in the laboratory of God. Humanity is just a work in progress.

And it was about then, about that time, that I began to find life unsatisfactory as an explanation of itself and was forced to adopt the method of the artist of not explaining but putting the blocks together in some other way that seems more significant to him. Which is a rather fancy way of saying I started writing.

It's hard enough for me to write what I want to write without me trying to write what you say they want me to write which I don't want to write.

Blanche: No, I have the misfortune of being an English instructor. I attempt to instill a bunch of bobby-soxers and drugstore Romeos with a reverence for Hawthorne and Whitman and Poe!

I am more faithful than I intended to be!

Luxury is the wolf at the door and its fangs are the vanities and conceits germinated by success. When an artist learns this, he knows where the danger is.

Glass breaks so easily. No matter how careful you are.