It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.

• Experience is never limited, and it is never complete it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness, and catching every air-borne particle in its tissue.
• It takes an endless amount of history to make even a little tradition.
• It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.
• The face of nature and civilization in this our country is to a certain point a very sufficient literary field. But it will yield its secrets only to a really grasping imagination. To write well and worthily of American things one need even more than elsewhere to be a master.
• Money's a horrid thing to follow, but a charming thing to meet.
• I adore adverbs they are the only qualifications I really much respect.
• The only success worth one's powder was success in the line of one's idiosyncrasy... what was talent but the art of being completely whatever one happened to be?
• Ideas are, in truth, force.
• A man who pretends to understand women is bad manners. For him to really to understand them is bad morals.
• We work in the dark - we do what we can - we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.