Paris is a hard place to leave, even when it rains incessantly and one coughs continually from the dampness.

If [the writer] achieves anything noble, anything enduring, it must be by giving himself absolutely to his material. And this gift of sympathy is his great gift; is the fine thing in him that alone can make his work fine.

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

There are some things you learn best in calm, and some in storm.

Writing ought either to be the manufacture of stories for which there is a market demand - a business as safe and commendable as making soap or breakfast foods - or it should be an art, which is always a search for something for which there is no market demand, something new and untried, where the values are intrinsic and have nothing to do with standardized values.

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

Love itself draws on a woman nearly all the bad luck in the world