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“ If his work is what it ought to be, the reader may be stimulated to fashion out his own deductions, but the fictionist who sets out to point a moral, usually ends most immorally by distorting a character.
Last of all—for here lies the vital differences between the work of a mere honest craftsman and a true artist,—I should like to hope that in my pages, I might now and then capture some gleam of beauty—beauty of form, or of thought, or of comprehending insight. For without this, fiction is a thing of effort, dead and mechanical, however well intentioned. ”

“ She was the young daughter of a Javanese Regent, one of the "princesses" who grow up and blossom in sombre obscurity and seclusion, leading their monotonous and often melancholy lives within the confines of the Kaboepatin, as the high walled Regent's palaces are called.
The thought of India, or as we now say, perhaps more happily, Java, had a strange fascination for me even as a child. I was charmed by the weird mystery of its stories which frightened even while they charmed me. Although I was born in Holland, our family traditions had been rooted in Java. ”

“ Some one unknown to us, sometimes speaking an incomprehensible language, hundreds of miles away, has drawn on paper various combinations of a score or so of signs, which we call letters, and when we look at them, we strangers, remote from the creator of the book, mysteriously perceive the meaning of all the words, the ideas, the feelings, the images; we admire the description of the scenes of nature, take delight in the beautiful rhythm of speech, the music of the words. ”

“ It is enough for me, at least, to know what I wish to embody in my own writings, no matter how far short of success I may fall in the endeavour, or how certainly my adherence to my own beliefs may cost me the interest of a public in whose commendation I would find a healthy, human enjoyment, provided always, I could have it without compromise.
I believe, then, that fiction is something vastly more than a medium of amusement. I believe it has been, in all countries and ages, that art best fitted to interpret life to the human beings who share that life. ”

“ It was in the bright, silver moonlight when the drooping palm trees trembled in the wind until they seemed to play a symphony so gentle and so complaining that it moved me to my soul. I do not know whether this was poetic imagination ever prone to be supersensitive, or in reality the "Quiet Strength," hidden in the heart of the East and eternally at war with the spirit of the West. It is certainly true that the Javanese has never been an open book to the Netherlander. ”

“ The loneliness of man in the Universe and on the earth, which is to many "a desert, alas! not unpeopled"—on earth amid the most tormenting contradiction of desires and possibilities—is realized only by few. But the faint feeling of it is implanted in the instinct of nearly every man like a noxious weed, and it often poisons the lives of men who appear to be perfectly immune from that murderous nostalgia which is the same for all ages and peoples, which tormented equally Byron the Englishman, Leopardi the Italian, the writer of "Ecclesiastes," and Lao-Tse, the great sage of Asia. ”

“ Such amusement either depraves the mind or arrests its action, and makes of the heart a mechanical toy which must be shaken violently before it will act.
Why do people go to the movies? Because their caged souls seek forgetfulness and joy as insistently as blind eyes yearn for light. But joy is such a stranger to them that they ignorantly mistake this owl-eyed Monster of Darkness for the Blue Bird of Happiness, I have asked many why they go to the movies, and have heard many reasons—most of them bad—but one answer recurs like a refrain: "There isn't any thing else to do." ”

“ I must protest against the movies, though I be stoned to death for it in the middle of Longacre Square.
My sight is either jaundiced or clairvoyant: which, I leave the reader to decide.
Strip life of its color, mystery, infinitude; make it stale, make it grey, make it flat; rob the human being of his aura, deny him speech, quicken his movements into galvanic action; people a glaring parallelogram with these gigantic simulacra of men and women moved by sub-human motives ”

“ Literature may also be called the all-seeing eye of the world, whose glance penetrates into the deepest recesses of the human spirit. A book—so simple a thing and so familiar—is, essentially, one of the great and mysterious wonders of the world. ”

“ She was shut in by aristocratic traditions and living virtually imprisoned as became a young "princess" of Java; but she sang of her longing for life and work and her voice rose clearer and stronger. It penetrated to the distant Netherlands, and was heard there with wonder and with delight. She was singing a new song, the first complaint that had ever gone forth from the mysterious hidden life of the Javanese woman. With all the energy of her body and soul she wanted to be free, to work and to live and to love. ”

“ A murderer in Asia is as loathsome as in Europe; the Russian miser Plushkin is as pitiable as the French Grandet; the Tartufes of all countries are alike, Misanthropes are equally miserable everywhere, and everywhere every one is equally charmed by the touching image of Don Quixote, the Knight of the Spirit. And after all, all men, in all languages, always speak of the same things, of themselves and their fate. Men of brute instincts are everywhere alike, the world of the intellect alone is infinitely varied. ”

“ The point is, Mr Hergesheimer's power "to make you hear, to make you feel ... before all, to make you see" is the condition of his success as a coiner of beauty. It is also his way, whatever way another artist may take, to reveal to us those glimpses of deep truth for which we may, indeed, have forgotten to ask, but for which, once they are opened to our sight, we can never forget to be grateful. ”

“ To me, it seems that any and every phase of human life, any and every choice of scene and dramatis personae is worthy of the fictionist's study, and his only inflexible obligation is to paint life as he sees it instead of sophisticating his tints and outlines to portray what he would prefer seeing, or to depict what he thinks his readers would like to see, or, worst of all, to prove some pet thesis. ”

“ When you look closely into the mighty stream of creative energy embodied in the word and image, you feel and believe that the great purpose of this stream is to wash away for ever all the differences between races, nations, classes, and, by freeing men from the hard burden of the struggle with each other, to direct all their forces to the struggle with the mysterious forces of nature. ”

“ But today even campus-pump critics are more or less aware of her, and one hears no more gabble about imitations. The plain fact is that she is now discovered to be a novelist of original methods and quite extraordinary capacities—penetrating and accurate in observation, delicate in feeling, brilliant and charming in manner, and full of a high sense of the dignity and importance of her work. Bit by bit, patiently and laboriously, she has mastered the trade of the novelist; in each succeeding book she has shown an unmistakable advance. ”

“ Literature is the heart of the world, winged with all its joys and sorrows, with all the dreams and hopes of men, with their despair and wrath, with their reverence before the beauty of nature, their fears in face of her mysteries. ”

“ If the United States ever becomes civilized and develops a literature, no doubt the Middle West will be the scene of the prodigy. The two coasts are washed by too many paralysing and distracting waves. Boston, after three hundred years, remains a mere suburb of London, timorous, respectable and preposterous—a sort of ninth-rate compound of Putney and Maida Vale. New York is simply a bawdy free port, without nationality or personality. ”

“ Watching man with the eyes of a sensitive friend, or with the stern glance of a judge, sympathizing with him, laughing at him, admiring his courage, cursing his nullity—literature rises above life, and, together with science, lights up for men the paths to the achievement of their goals, to the development of what is good in them. ”

“ The great virtue of literature is that by deepening our consciousness, by widening our perception of life, by giving shape to our feelings, it speaks to us as with a voice saying: All ideals and acts, all the world of the spirit is created out of the blood and nerves of men. ”

“ Here was a novel planned with the utmost skill, and executed in truly admirable fashion. Here, unless I err gravely, was the best piece of fiction ever done by a woman in America.
I once protested to Miss Cather that her novels came too far apart—that the reading public, constantly under a pressure of new work, had too much chance to forget her. She was greatly astonished. "How could I do any more?" she asked. "I work all the time. It takes three years to write a novel." ”

“ Human errors are not so characteristic of the art of the word and image; more characteristic is its longing to raise man above the external conditions of existence, to free him from the fetters of the degrading actuality, to show him to himself not as the slave, but as the lord of circumstance, the free creator of life, and in this sense literature is ever revolutionary. ”

“ A fictionist's public has no right to a predigested diet, or to a menu skilfully arranged to give it only what it happens to enjoy.
Unless the author has something actually craving utterance, there is no excuse for his intrusion into a world already well provided with printed matter, and if he feels this impulse for expression he cannot satisfy it if he expresses the conception of his critics, his publishers, or that inarticulate abstraction called the public. ”

“ By his very choice of fiction as his mode of expression, the author is committed to some sense of form. He has acknowledged also the duty of telling some kind of a story which shall not prove unbearably dull to the sensitive and alert reader. If he has no story at all, he is an essayist in an ill-fitting disguise. If he cannot or will not endeavour to interest some portion of the public, he might as well keep a diary and secure it under lock and key; but the writer holds himself and his art too cheaply who makes no demands what ever upon his reader. ”

“ Moved to tears, angry, dreaming, sometimes laughing over the motley printed sheets, we grasp the life of the spirit, akin or foreign to ourselves. The book is, perhaps, the most complicated and mightiest of all the miracles created by man on his path to the happiness and power of the future. ”

“ Rising from the mystery of birth, we plunge into the mystery of death. Together with our planet we have been thrown into incomprehensible space. We call it the Universe, but we have no precise conception of it, and our loneliness in it has such an ironical perfection that we have nothing with which to compare it. ”

“ By the mighty effort of genius rising about all circumstances of actuality, saturated with the spirit of humanity, kindling its hatred from the excess of passionate love, fine literature, prose and poetry, is our great vindication, and not our condemnation. ”

“ Today all the saloons are closed, and professional philanthropy prides itself on the fact that more men go now to the movies. The saloon was an evil institution, but the prostitution of the mind is worse than any poisoning of the nerves.
The priests of the temple of the Movie Momus do not know that they are offering a form of amusement which stifles the mind and hardens the heart. Doubtless they believe the contrary, but it is a case of the blind led by the blind: Neither know where they are going, and each depends upon the other to lead the way. ”

“ Any first rate novel or story must have in it the strength of a dozen fairly good stories that have been sacrificed to it. A good workman can't be a cheap workman; he can't be stingy about wasting material, and he cannot compromise. Writing ought either to be the manufacture of stories for which there is a market demand—a business as safe and commendable as making soap or breakfast foods—or it should be an art, which is always a search for something for which there is no market demand, something new and untried, where the values are intrinsic and have nothing to do with standardized values. ”

“ The courage to go on without compromise does not come to a writer all at once—nor, for that matter, does the ability. Both are phases of natural development. In the beginning, the artist, like his public, is wedded to old forms, old ideals, and his vision is blurred by the memory of old delights he would like to recapture. ”

“ The difference in Spanish cities between the labouring men and the bourgeoisie is not very great. We frequently see the workingman leap the barrier into the bourgeoisie, and then disclose himself as a unique flower of knavery, extortion and misdirected ingenuity. Deep down in the hearts of our revolutionists, I do not believe that there is any real enthusiasm for the workingman. ”