A good writer preserves an air of freedom in his prose, so that the reader won't know how a story will end - even if he's reading a history book.

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.

Characterization in a play is like a blank check which the dramatist accords to the actor for him to fill in.

Seek the lofty by reading, hearing and seeing great work at some moment every day.

I was an old man when I was 12; and now I am an old man, AND IT'S SPLENDID!

But such occasions of excellence became less and less frequent. As her technique became sounder, [her] sincerity became less necessary.

He regarded love as a sort of cruel malady through which the elect are required to pass in their late youth and from which they emerge, pale and wrung, but ready for the business of living.