“Secrets. Need to disguise. The novel was born of this.”

“My secrets cry aloud.
I have no need for tongue.
My heart keeps open house,
My doors are widely swung.
An epic of the eyes
My love, with no disguise.”

“Almost all the great novels have as their motif, more or less disguised, the "passage from childhood to maturity", the clash between the thrill of expectation, and the disillusioning knowledge of the truth.”

“Be alone, that is the secret of invention; be alone, that is when ideas are born.”

“Much like the French (or like ourselves, their apes),
Who with strange habit do disguise their shapes;
Who loving novels, full of affectation,
Receive the manners of each other nation.”

“Secret Notes:
He wrote secret notes to people he hadn't met yet. Some of them aren't even born, he said, but we live in a strange neighborhood & they will need help figuring things out & I won't always be around to explain it to them.”

“A secret needs two faces to bounce between; a secret needs to see itself in another pair of eyes.”

“We're animals. We're born like every other mammal and we live our whole lives around disguised animal thoughts.”

“What magic shall solve us the secret
Of beauty that’s born for an hour?”

“…I have discovered that plays are easier to write than novels if the writer has a certain verbal facility, a certain capacity for the colloquial, an ear for the secret cadences of the spoken word. A play can be written with more ease than a novel…”