The supreme virtue in art is soul, perhaps it is the only thing which gives it the right to be.
A burnt dog dreads the fire.
Pity is sworn servant unto love: And this be sure, wherever it begin To make the way, it lets your master in.
It is a tragic hour, that hour when we are finally driven to reckon with ourselves, when every avenue of mental distraction has been cut off and our own life and all its ineffaceable failures closes about us like the walls of that old torture chamber of the Inquisition.
For ever and anon the soul becomes weary of the conventions that are not of it, and with a single stroke shatters the civilized lies with which it is unable to cope, and the strong arm reaches out and takes by force what it cannot win by cunning.
You must not begin to fret about the successes of cheap people. After all, what have they to do with you?
Every artist makes herself born. You must bring the artist into the world yourself.
Every fine story must leave in the mind of the sensitive reader an intangible residuum of pleasure, a cadence, a quality of voice that is exclusively the writer’s own, individual, unique.
Religion and art spring from the same root and are close kin.
An artist’s saddest secrets are those that have to do with his artistry.
The air and the earth interpenetrated in the warm gusts of spring; the soil was full of sunlight, and the sunlight full of red dust. The air one breathed was saturated with earthy smells, and the grass under foot had a reflection of the blue sky in it.
Some people’s lives are affected by what happens to their person or their property; but for others fate is what happens to their feelings and their thoughts – that and nothing more.
There is something frank and joyous and young in the open face of the country. It gives itself ungrudgingly to the moods of the season, holding nothing back.
Freedom so often means that one isn’t needed anywhere.
Miracles surround us at every turn if we but sharpen our perceptions of them.
The land belongs to the future.
Art, it seems to me, should simplify finding what conventions of form and what detail one can do without and yet preserve the spirit of the whole – so that all that one has suppressed and cut away is there to the reader’s consciousness as much as if it were in type on the page.
Sometimes I wonder why God ever trusts talent in the hands of women, they usually make such an infernal mess of it. I think He must do it as a sort of ghastly joke.
Imagination, which is a quality writers must have, does not mean the ability to weave pretty stories out of nothing. In the right sense, imagination is a response to what is going on – a sensitiveness to which outside things appeal. It is a composition of sympathy and observation.
In this world people have to pay an extortionate price for any exceptional gift whatever.