Art does not lie in copying nature.- Nature furnishes the material by means of which is to express a beauty still unexpressed in nature.-The artist beholds in nature more than she herself is conscious of.
Though it might have its momentary alarms, paternity is not an exciting vocation.
Adjectives are the sugar of literature and adverbs the salt.
Autobiography may be the preeminent kind of American expression.
There are moods in which one feels the impulse to enter a tacit protest against too gross an appetite for pure aesthetics in this starving and sinning world. One turns half away, musingly, from certain beautiful useless things.
Which of you with taking thought can add to his stature one cubit?
We must for dear life make our own counter-realities.
One is oneself a fine consequence.
It might seem that an egg which has succeeded in being fresh has done all that can reasonably be expected of it.
There are women who are for all your ‘times of life.’ They’re the most wonderful sort.
I recall my fleeting instants in Savannah as the taste of a cup charged to the brim.
To kill a human being is, after all, the least injury you can do him.
Art is nothing more than the shadow of humanity.
London doesn’t love the latent or the lurking, has neither time, nor taste, nor sense for anything less discernible than the red flag in front of the steam-roller. It wants cash over the counter and letters ten feet high.
We are divided of course between liking to feel the past strange and liking to feel it familiar.
People can be in general pretty well trusted, of course – with the clock of their freedom ticking as loud as it seems to do here – to keep an eye on the fleeting hour.
Most English talk is a quadrille in a sentry-box.
I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of an artistic process.
A tradition is kept alive only by something being added to it.
If I should certainly say to a novice, ‘Write from experience and experience only,’ I should feel that this was rather a tantalizing monition if I were not careful immediately to add, ‘Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost.’