Artistic growth is, more than it is anything else, a refining of the sense of truthfulness.

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

In other searchings it might be the object of the quest that brought satisfaction, or it might be something incidental that one got on the way; but in religion, desire was fulfilment, it was the seeking itself that rewarded.

Merely having seen the season change in a country gave one the sense of having been there for a long time.

Setting ... is accident. Either a building is part of a place, or it is not. Once that kinship is there, time will only make it stronger.

All Southern women wished of their menfolk was simply to be 'like Paris handsome and like Hector brave'.

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