A writer's business is minding other people's business ... all the vices of the village gossip are the virtues of the writer.

The artist who really loves people loves them so well the way they are he sees no need to disguise their characteristics-he loves them whole, without retouching. Yet the word used for this unqualifying affection is 'cynicism'.

The human comedy is always tragic, but since its ingredients are always the same - dupe, fox, straight, like burlesque skits - the repetition through the ages is comedy.

I think we will have a boy baby and he will be born on the 20th of August. Everyone else has a girl baby and at times I don't believe I should mind having a little Phyllis Dawn but Dearest wants a boy and I do.

There is really one city for everyone just as there is one major love.

You woke in the morning with the weight of doom on your head. You lay with eyes shut wondering why you dreaded the day was it a debt, was it a lost love? -and then you remembered the nightmare....This was no time for beauty, for love, or private future....There was no future everyone waited, marked time, waited. For what?

All Americans come from Ohio originally, if only briefly.

For a genius to be a genius, he must have a selfless slave between himself and the world.

I realize more and more how instinctively pessimistic I am of all human kindness -- since I am always so bowled over by it -- and am never surprised by injustice, malice or personal attack.

I want so much for my lover. At night when our beds are drawn close together I waken and see his dear yellow head on the pillow - sometimes his arm thrown over on my bed - and I kiss his hand, very softly so that it will not waken him.

A novel must be a rich forest known at the start only by instinct.

Hold fast to whatever fragments of love that exist, for sometimes a mosaic is more beautiful than an unbroken pattern.

Joe and Jojo and I had lovely day together. I love Joe so much - more and more.