Only ambitious nonentities and hearty mediocrities exhibit their rough drafts. It's like passing around samples of sputum.

Solitude is the playfield of Satan.

Literature is invention. Fiction is fiction. To call a story a true story is an insult to both art and truth.

The summer night was starless and stirless, with distant spasms of silent lightning.

Literature was not born the day when a boy crying "wolf, wolf" came running out of the Neanderthal valley with a big gray wolf at his heels; literature was born on the day when a boy came crying "wolf, wolf" and there was no wolf behind him.

We are most artistically caged.

The general impression is that fifteen year-old Dolly remains morbidly uninterested in sexual matters, or to be exact, represses her curiosity in order to save her ignorance and self-dignity.