Nothing induces me to read a novel except when I have to make money by writing about it. I detest them.

She felt, with her hand on the nursery door, that community of feeling with other people which emotion gives as if the walls of partition had become so thin that practically (the feeling was one of relief and happiness) it was all one stream.

I will dream today; for I must unscrew my head somehow.

I want the concentration and the romance, and the worlds all glued together, fused, glowing: have no time to waste any more on prose.

The extraordinary woman depends on the ordinary woman. It is only when we know what were the conditions of the average woman's life - the number of children, whether she had money of her own, if she had a room to herself, whether she had help bringing up her family, if she had servants, whether part of the housework was her task - it is only when we can measure the way of life and experience made possible to the ordinary woman that we can account for the success or failure of the extraordinary woman as a writer.

Am I too fast, too facile? I do not know. I do not know myself sometimes, or how to measure and name and count out the grains that make me what I am.

We live in constant danger of coming apart. The mystery of why we do not always come apart is the animating tension of all art.