What was any art but a mould in which to imprison for a moment the shining elusive element which is life itself - life hurrying past us and running away, too strong to stop, too sweet to lose.

A child's attitude toward everything is an artist's attitude.

Every artist makes himself born. It is very much harder than the other time, and longer.

The air was cool enough to make the warm sun pleasant on one's back and shoulders, and so clear that the eye could follow a hawk up and up, into the blazing blue depths of the sky.

Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen.

[Mark Twain] is still the rough, awkward, good-natured boy who swore at the deck hands when he was three years old. Thoroughly likeable as a good fellow, but impossible as a man of letters.

To note an artist's limitations is but to define his talent.