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.
I have not much faith in women in fiction.... Women are so horribly subjective and they have such scorn for the healthy commonplace. When a woman writes a story of adventure, a stout sea tale, a manly battle yarn, anything without wine, women, and love, then I will begin to hope for something great from them, not before.
So long as a novelist works selfishly for the pleasure of creating character and situation corresponding to his own illusions, ideals and intuitions, he will always produce something worth while and natural. Directly he takes himself too seriously and begins for the alleged benefit of humanity an elaborate dissection of complexes, he evolves a book that is more ridiculous and tiresome than the most conventional cold cream girl novel of yesterday.
Of all the bewildering things about a new country, the absence of human landmarks is one of the most depressing and disheartening.
Men are all right for friends, but as soon as you marry them they turn into cranky old fathers, even the wild ones.
Paris is a hard place to leave, even when it rains incessantly and one coughs continually from the dampness.
We all like people who do things, even if we only see their faces on cigar-box lids.
Happy people do a great deal for their friends.
Most publishers, like most writers, are ruined by their successes.
Loyal? As loyal as anyone who plays second fiddle ever is.
One may have staunch friends in one's own family, but one seldom has admirers.
This land was an enigma. It was like a horse that no one knows how to break to harness, that runs wild and kicks things to pieces.
The trees and shrubbery seemed well-groomed and social, like pleasant people.
The higher processes are all processes of simplification. The novelist must learn to write, and then he must unlearn it; just as the modern painter learns to draw, and then learns when utterly to disregard his accomplishment, when to subordinate it to a higher and truer effect.
Yet the summer which was to change everything was coming nearer every day. When boys and girls are growing up, life can't stand still, not even in the quietest of country towns; and they have to grow up, whether they will or no. That is what their elders are always forgetting.
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