Mary MacLane

One must always say things that aim to interest, because in the world one must after all pay for one's keep.

My intention to lecture is as vague as my intention is to go on the stage. I will never consider an offer to lecture, not because I despise the vocation, but because I have no desire to appear on the public rostrum.

I want to write such things as compel the admiring acclamation of the world at large, such things as are written but once in years, things subtle but distinctly different from the books written every day.

I would rather be a fairly happy wife and mother.

I was born to be alone, and I always shall be; but now I want to be.

When I wrote my book I wanted to love someone. I wanted to be in love. Now I know that I shall never be in love - and I no longer wish to be.

I love devils.

Genius of a kind has always been with me; an empty heart that has taken on a certain wooden quality; an excellent, strong woman's body and a pitiably starved soul.

The book, you understand, was not written for publication. It was the portrayal of my emotions, the analysis of my own soul life during three months of my nineteenth year. I wrote then all the time, just as I do now, but, though the book is in diary form, it is not a diary.

When I was three years old I was taken with my family to a little town in Western Minnesota, where I lived a more or less vapid and ordinary life until I was ten.

Well, if I am not vulgar, neither is my book. I wrote myself. Suggestiveness is always vulgar. But truth never. My book is not even remotely suggestive. I call things by their names. That is all.

Just why I sent it to the publishers would be hard to say, but when I had finished it I felt that it was literature, because it is real and because it was well written. And I know that the world wants such things.