It's with bad sentiments that one makes good novels.

Romances I never read like those I have seen.

The only reason for the existence of a novel is that it does attempt to represent life.

But I hate things all fiction... there should always be some foundation of fact for the most airy fabric -- and pure invention is but the talent of a liar.

What is a novel if not a conviction of our fellow-men's existence strong enough to take upon itself a form of imagined life clearer than reality and whose accumulated verisimilitude of selected episodes puts to shame the pride of documentary history?

The time-honored bread-sauce of the happy ending.

When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature.

Writing a novel is not merely going on a shopping expedition across the border to an unreal land: it is hours and years spent in the factories, the streets, the cathedrals of the imagination.

Our interest's on the dangerous edge of things. The honest thief, the tender murderer, the superstitious atheist.

I at least have so much to do in unraveling certain human lots, and seeing how they were woven and interwoven, that all the light I can command must be concentrated on this particular web, and not dispersed over that tempting range of relevancies called the universe.