There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.

An author spends months writing a book, and maybe puts his heart's blood into it, and then it lies about unread till the reader has nothing else in the world to do.

If you can tell stories, create characters, devise incidents, and have sincerity and passion, it doesn't matter a damn how you write.

Sometimes people carry to such perfection the mask they have assumed that in due course they actually become the person they seem.

As lovers, the difference between men and women is that women can love all day long, but men only at times.

Life is so largely controlled by chance that its conduct can be but a perpetual improvisation.

Why should you think that beauty, which is the most precious thing in the world, lies like a stone on the beach for the careless passer-by to pick up idly? Beauty is something wonderful and strange that the artist fashions out of the chaos of the world in the torment of his soul. And when he has made it, it is not given to all to know it. To recognize it you must repeat the adventure of the artist. It is a melody that he sings to you, and to hear it again in your own heart you want knowledge and sensitiveness and imagination.

If a man hasn't what's necessary to make a woman love him, it's his fault, not hers.

Sometimes a man hits upon a place to which he mysteriously feels that he belongs.

All the words I use in my stories can be found in the dictionary-it's just a matter of arranging them into the right sentences.

Art is a manifestation of emotion, and emotion speaks a language that all may understand.

I can imagine no more comfortable frame of mind for the conduct of life than a humorous resignation.

Only a mediocre person is always at his best.

You know, of course, that the Tasmanians, who never committed adultery, are now extinct.

Every production of an artist should be the expression of an adventure of his soul.

No affectation of peculiarity can conceal a commonplace mind.

For men and women are not only themselves; they are also the region in which they are born, the city apartment or farm in which they learnt to walk, the games they played as children, the old wives tales they overheard, the food they ate, the schools they attended, the sports they followed, the poets they read, and the God they believed in. It is all these things that have made them what they are, and these are the things that you can't come to know by hearsay...

You can do anything in this world if you are prepared to take the consequences.

I'd sooner be smashed into a mangled pulp by a bus when we cross the street than look forward to a life like yours.

It wasn't until late in life that I discovered how easy it is to say, 'I don't know.

But I am not sure it would contain any short stories. For the short story is a minor art, and it must content itself with moving, exciting and amusing the reader. ...I do not think that there is any (short story) that will give the reader that thrill, that rapture, that fruitful energy which great art can produce.

What makes old age hard to bear is not the failing of one's faculties, mental and physical, but the burden of one's memories.

I don't understand anything. Life is so strange. I feel like some one who's lived all his life by a duck-pond and suddenly is shown the sea. It makes me a little breathless, and yet it fills me with elation. I don't want to die, I want to live. I'm beginning to feel a new courage. I feel like one of those old sailors who set sail for undiscovered seas and I think my soul hankers for the unknown.

If nobody spoke unless he had something to say, the human race would verysoon lose the use of speech.