Will the reader turn the page?

Writers seldom choose as friends those self-contained characters who are never in trouble, never unhappy or ill, never make mistakes and always count their change when it is handed to them.

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 toward the lesser sins, a pleasing readiness also to admit the possibility that on occasion they may be in the wrong – they may be mistaken.

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.

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 all clean and quiet and empty, ready for the spirit that may choose to be its guest.

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 soloism – we share. No altruism this, for we receive tenfold what we give.

Chamber music – a conversation between friends.

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 black ink.

I speak truth, not so much as I would, but as much as I dare; and I dare a little more, as I grown older.

Writing, I think, is not apart from living. Writing is a kind of double living The writer experiences everything twice. Once in reality and once in that mirror which waits always before or behind.