Many people seem to think that art is a luxury to be imported and tacked on to life. Art springs out of the very stuff that life is made of. Most of our young authors start to write a story and make a few observations from nature to add local color. The results are invariably false and hollow. Art must spring out of the fullness and richness of life.

The emptiness was intense, like the stillness in a great factory when the machinery stops running.

The trouble is you almost have to marry a man before you can find out the sort of wife he needs; and usually it's exactly the sort you are not.

The fact that I was a girl never damaged my ambitions to be a pope or an emperor.

The sincerity of feeling that is possible between a writer and a reader is one of the finest things I know.

Every fine story must leave in the mind of the sensitive reader an intangible residuum of pleasure, a cadence, a quality of voice that is exclusively the writer's own, individual, unique.

I first met Myra Henshawe when I was fifteen, but I had known her about ever since I could remember anything at all.