The world is like a little marsh filled with mint and white hawthorn.

When I was three years old I was taken with my family to a little town in Western Minnesota, where I lived a more or less vapid and ordinary life until I was ten.

Let me but make a beginning, let me but strike the world in a vulnerable spot, and I can take it by storm.

I do not sing nor play, but I adore music, particularly Chopin. I like him because I cannot understand him.

I want to write such things as compel the admiring acclamation of the world at large, such things as are written but once in years, things subtle but distinctly different from the books written every day.

I never give my real self. I have a hundred sides, and I turn first one way and then the other. I am playing a deep game. I have a number of strong cards up my sleeve. I have never been myself, excepting to two friends.