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.

From two ears that had grown side by side, the grains of one shot up joyfully into the light, projecting themselves into the future, and the grains from the other lay still in the earth and rotted; and nobody knew why.

Life began for me, when I ceased to admire and began to remember.

Religion and art spring from the same root and are close kin.

Too much detail is apt, like any other form of extravagance, to become slightly vulgar.

Too much information is rather deadening.

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