If what you write is true, it will not be so because of what you are as a writer but because of what you are as a being. There can be no literary equivalent to truth. If, in writing, truth is the quality of what is said, told, this is not a literary achievement: it is a simple human achievement.

Forgive me, giver, if I destroy the gift. It is so nearly what would please me I cannot but perfect it.

Art, whose honesty must work through artifice, cannot avoid cheating truth. Poetic art cheats truth to further and finer degrees than art of any other kind bec…

There is a sense of life so real that it becomes the sense of something more real than life:It is the meaning at work in what has no meaning; it is, at its cle…

In every man's writings, the character of the writer must lie recorded.

You take people, you put them on a journey, you give them peril, you find out who they really are. If there's any kind of fiction better than that, I don't kno…

His [Champlain's] books mark the man,-all for his theme and his purpose, nothing for himself. Crude in style, full of the superficial errors of carelessness an…