No author can create a character out of nothing. He must have a model to give him a starting point; but then his imagination goes to work, he builds him up, adding a trait here, a trait there, which his model did not possess.

The normal is what you find but rarely. The normal is an ideal. It is a picture that one fabricates of the average characteristics of men, and to find them all in a single man is hardly to be expected.

What do we any of us have but our illusions? And what do we ask of others but that we be allowed to keep them?

The future will one day be the present and will seem as unimportant as the present does now.

I have an idea that the only thing which makes it possible to regard this world we live in without disgust is the beauty which now and then men create out of the chaos. The pictures they paint, the music they compose, the books they write, and the lives they lead. Of all these the richest in beauty is the beautiful life. That is the perfect work of art.

Reserve is an artificial quality that is developed in most of us but as the result of innumerable rebuffs.

The writer of prose can only step aside when the poet passes...