Most publishers, like most writers, are ruined by their successes.

So long as a novelist works selfishly for the pleasure of creating character and situation corresponding to his own illusions, ideals and intuitions, he will always produce something worth while and natural. Directly he takes himself too seriously and begins for the alleged benefit of humanity an elaborate dissection of complexes, he evolves a book that is more ridiculous and tiresome than the most conventional cold cream girl novel of yesterday.

It is cremated youth. It is all yours--no one gave it to you.

Miracles surround us at every turn if we but sharpen our perceptions of them.

William Tavener never heeded ominous forecasts in the domestic horizon, and he never looked for a storm until it broke.

One afternoon late in October of the year 1697, Euclide Auclair, the philosopher apothecary of Quebec, stood on the top of Cap Diamant gazing down the broad, empty river far beneath him.

Nothing mattered ... but writing books, and living the kind of life that made it possible to write them.