What the artist wishes to do — as far as you are concerned — is to take you out of yourself. As far as he is concerned, he wishes to express himself.

Higher than the beasts, lower than the angels, stuck in our idiot Eden.

And it was a most remarkable, a most moving glance, as if for a moment a lighthouse had looked at me.

The object of the novelist is to keep the reader entirely oblivious of the fact that the author exists - even of the fact he is reading a book.

Only two classes of books are of universal appeal. The very best and the very worst.

If you're going to have a character appear in a story long enough to sell a newspaper, he'd better be real enough that you can smell his breath.

Open the book to page ninety-nine and read, and the quality of the whole will be revealed to you.

Why can't people have what they want? The things were all there to content everybody; yet everybody has the wrong thing.

Pride and reserve are not the only things in life; perhaps they are not even the best things. But if they happen to be your particular virtues you will go all to pieces if you let them go.

The first thing you have to consider when writing a novel is your story, and then your story - and then your story!

New York is large, glamorous, easy-going, kindly and incurious, but above all it is a crucible - because it is large enough to be incurious.

Irrespective of what religious or intellectual philosophy guides an enlightened person’s life plan, self-mastery plays an important, if not quintessential role.

Thoughts were zipping around my head like fireflies in a jar, bumping into each other, blinking on and off.

A man should first direct himself in the way he should go. Only then should he instruct others.

nobody can save you but yourself and you’re worth saving. it’s a war not easily won but if anything is worth winning then this is it.

I think even the most beautiful person looks stupid on Skype.

In so complex a thing as human nature, we must consider it is hard to find rules without exception.

Eloquence is a republican art, as conversation is an aristocratic one.

Children need models rather than critics.

There have been many most excellent poets that have never versified, and now swarm many versifiers that need never answer to the name of poets.

Parents teach in the toughest school in the world - The School for Making People. You are the board of education, the principal, the classroom teacher, and the janitor.