It is the duty of the writer to describe.

Books should stand on their own feet ... If they need shoring up by a preface here, an introduction there, they have no more right to exist than a table that needs a wad of paper under one leg in order to stand steady.

And now more than anything I want beautiful prose. I relish it more and more exquisitely.

Never let anybody guess that you have a mind of your own. Above all be pure

As for 'drawing you out,' please believe I don't do such things deliberately, with an object -- It's only that I am, as a rule, far more interested in people than they are in me -- But it makes me a nuisance, I know: only an innocent nuisance.

Green in nature is one thing, green in literature another. Nature and letters seem to have a natural antipathy; bring them together and they tear each other to pieces.

I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse, perhaps, to be locked in.