Every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.

This late age of the world’s experience had bred in them all, all men and women, a well of tears.

Yet there are moments when the walls of the mind grow thin; when nothing is unabsorbed, and I could fancy that we might blow so vast a bubble that the sun might set and rise in it and we might take the blue of midday and the black of midnight and be cast off and escape from here and now.

The real novelist, the perfectly simple human being, could go on, indefinitely imaging.

Without self-confidence we are as babes in the cradles. And how can we generate this imponderable quality, which is yet so invaluable most quickly? By thinking that other people are inferior to oneself.

Books are the mirrors of the soul.