Every writer is necessarily a critic - that is, each sentence is a skeleton accompanied by enormous activity of rejection; and each selection is governed by general principles concerning truth, force, beauty, and so on. The critic that is in every fabulist is like the iceberg - nine-tenths of him is under water.

I think I write in order to discover on my shelf a new book that I would enjoy reading, or to see a new play that would engross me.

One of the dangers of the American artist is that he finds himself almost exclusively thrown in with persons more or less in the arts. He lives among them, eats among them, quarrels with them, marries them.

The difference between a little money and no money at all is enormous-and can shatter the world. And the difference between a little money and an enormous amount of money is very slight-and that, also, can shatter the world.

Art is not only the desire to tell one's secret; it is the desire to tell it and hide it at the same time.

All excellence is equally difficult.

The revival in religion will be a rhetorical problem - new persuasive words for defaced or degraded ones.