I am less sympathetic with people who search for Freudian undertones in my art work. "Do you know what is symbolized when you painted that large red flower in the lower left-hand corner?" they ask in hushed tones. After I explain that the phone rang while I was holding my brush over the paper and, in leaping up to answer, I dropped a blob of red, which later was expanded into a flower because it looked less messy that way, they still act as if  my one impromptu posy were a dozen long-stemmed neuroses.

-- from "Look, I'm Framed!" (1949)

In this spirit, she had phoned and invited her neighbor over for drinks: "Bring your houseguest. Are you going to marry him?" She was old enough to say whatever she wanted to, although age had very little to do with it. She had usually said what she wanted to, from the age of eleven months on.

Men seldom objected to Lucy's frankness. She had been a beauty, and now, in her sixties, she still had the finely whittled bones, the flash and fire-- and sometimes the imperious ways-- of an indestructible belle. But not a Southern belle; Lucy was much too direct. Women were more put off by this then men. Grace Dillworth had shied away from the head-on frankness of "Are you going to marry him?" And she had gone on to commit the unforgivable (to Lucy) stupidity of refusing the invitation with top-of-the-tongue phrases like "take a rain check." One did N O T take a rain check for a command performance. Lucy, a solipsist, took a dim view of this."

-- from A Dying Fall (1973)

Mother always hoped that at least one of her children would be an artist. and since I was the oldest, she hoped hardest for me. Her method of encouraging this was to leave plenty of scratch pads and pencils and crayons around the house, but it soon became apparent that I am one of those who can draw a straight line-- and nothing more. Instead, I used the pencils and paper for my literary output. One day after I'd heard Mother reading the Jungle Book to Sally and Jimmy, I went up to my room with a new ambition. Soon my wails of agony reached through the house, and Mother came running upstairs frightened nearly silly. "What happened? What is it?" I pointed to an almost blank sheet of paper and wept anew. Mother stared at it anxiously, but she still couldn't make out what ghastly thing has befallen me. "I c-c-can't write like Kipling," I sobbed.

-from We Shook the Family Tree (1941)