Art requires, above all things, a suppression of self, a subordination of one’s self to an idea.
All roads lead to Rome, and there were times when it might have struck us that almost every branch of study or subject of conversation skirted forbidden ground.
There’s no more usual basis of union than mutual misunderstanding.
To believe in a child is to believe in the future. Through their aspirations they will save the world. With their combined knowledge the turbulent seas of hate and injustice will be calmed.
I have lived too long in foreign parts.
Any point of view is interesting that is a direct impression of life. You each have an impression colored by your individual conditions; make that into a picture, a picture framed by your own personal wisdom, your glimpse of the American world.
I’ve struck up a tremendous intimacy with Conte Alberto, and we literally can’t live without each other. He is the first object my eyes greet in the morning, and the last at night.
Always keep a window in the attic open; not just cracked: open.
Don’t try so much to form your character – it’s like trying to pull open a tight, tender young rose. Live as you like best and your character will take care of itself.
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.