If art has a purpose, it is to interpret life, reproduce it in fresh visions..

It is a great, a pleasant thing to have a friend with whom to walk, untroubled, through the woods, by the stream, saying nothing, at peace--the heart….

Writing is not apart from living. Writing is a kind of double living..

History is, in its essence, exciting; to present it as dull is, to my mind, stark and unforgivable misrepresentation..

People who carry a musical soul about them are, I think, more receptive than others. They smile more readily. One feels in them a pleasant propensity….

A woman's biography - with about eight famous historical exceptions - so often turns out to be the story of a man and the woman who helped his career..

Great artists treasure their time with a bitter and snarling miserliness..

All the others arts are lonely. We paint alone--my picture, my interpretation of the sky. My poem, my novel. But in music--ensemble music, not solois….

your concert-goer, though he feed upon symphony as a lamb upon milk, is no true lover if he play no instrument. Your true lover does more than admire….

I have noted that, barring accidents, artists whose powers wear best and last longest are those who have trained themselves to work under adversity. ….

One of the marks of true genius is a quality of abundance. A rich, rollicking abundance, enough to give indigestion to ordinary people. Great artists….

In writing biography, fact and fiction shouldn't be mixed. And if they are, the fictional points should be printed in red ink, the facts printed in b….

Many a man who has known himself at ten forgets himself utterly between ten and thirty..

Writers seldom choose as friends those self-contained characters who are never in trouble, never unhappy or ill, never make mistakes, and always coun….

In early days, I tried not to give librarians any trouble, which was where I made my primary mistake. Librarians like to be given trouble; they exist….

Chamber music - a conversation between friends..

What the writer needs is an empty day ahead..

Artists often think they are going to die before their time. They seem to possess a heightened sense of the passing of the hours..

For your born writer, nothing is so healing as the realization that he has come upon the right word..

What pioneer ever had chart and a lighthouse to steer by?.

Biographers, by their very nature, want to know everything about everybody, dead or alive..