No man should ever publish a book until he has first read it to a woman.

As against having beautiful workshops, studies, etc., one writes best in a cellar on a rainy day.

No one in this country has any root anywhere; we don't live in America, we board here, we are like spiders that run over the surface of the water.

People of small calibre are always carping. How affected so-and-so is! Don't you think he is silly? He was certainly quite mistaken about this or that. They are bent on showing their own superiority, their knowledge or their prowess or good breeding.

No one is fit to judge a book until he has rounded Cape Horn in a sailing vessel, until he has bumped into two or three icebergs, until he has been lost in the sands of the desert, until he has spent a few years in the House of the Dead.

The writer is important only by dint of the territory he colonizes.

The creative impulses of man are always at war with the possessive impulses.