I am not sorry for having wrought in common, crude material so much; that is the right American stuff; and perhaps hereafter, when my din is done, if anyone is curious to know what that noise was, it will be found to have proceeded from a small insect which was scraping about on the surface of our life and trying to get into its meaning for the sake of the other insects larger or smaller. That is, such has been my unconscious work; consciously, I was always, as I still am, trying to fashion a piece of literature out of the life next at hand.

The mortality of all inanimate things is terrible to me, but that of books most of all.

Clemens was sole, incomparable, the Lincoln of our literature.

The wrecks of slavery are fast growing a fungus crop of sentiment.

There is something about the literary life that repels me, all this desperate building of castles on cobwebs, the long-drawn acrimonious struggle to make somet…

I took to writing at an early age to escape from meaninglessness, uselessness, unimportance, insignificance, poverty, enslavement, ill health, despair, madness…

Disraeli felt that 'nothing could compensate his obscure youth, not even a glorious old age.' Practically all writers and artists are aware of their destiny an…