“It is always a mistake to be plain-spoken.”

If the communication is perfect, the words have life, and that is all there is to good writing, putting down on the paper words which dance and weep and make love and fight and kiss and perform miracles.

It takes a heap of loafing to write a book.

Communists are people who fancied that they had an unhappy childhood.

I understand you undertake to overthrow my undertaking.

There is no such thing as repetition. Only insistance.

You are extraordinary within your limits, but your limits are extraordinary!

Too few is as many as too many.

But the problem is that when I go around and speak on campuses, I still don’t get young men standing up and saying, ‘How can I combine career and family?’

An audience is always warming but it must never be necessary to your work.

Each generation has something different at which they are all looking.

If you are looking down while you are walking it is better to walk up hill the ground is nearer.

I really do not know that anything has ever been more exciting than diagramming sentences.

there are the two sides to a Frenchman, logic and fashion and that is the reason why French people are exciting and peaceful. Logic and fashion.

A writer should write with his eyes and a painter paint with his ears.

You are so afraid of losing your moral sense that you are not willing to take it through anything more dangerous than a mud-puddle.

A very important thing is not to make up your mind that you are any one thing.

When an American says that he loves his country, he means not only that he loves the New England hills, the prairies glistening in the sun, the wide and rising plains

Are we not madder than those first inhabitants of the plain of Sennar? We know that the distance separating the earth from the sky is infinite, and yet we do not stop building our tower.

Everything has been created twice once on a mental plain and once on a physical plain.

If we had paused to tell the people that we were Marxist-Leninists while we were on Pico Turquino and not yet strong, it is possible that we would never have been able to descend to the plains.

This is my life, I thought…I have excised the cancer from my past, cut it out; I have crossed the high plains, descended into the desert, traversed oceans, and planted my feet in new soil

The time for the kingdom may be far off, but the task is plain: to retain our share in God in spite of peril and contempt.

That is the land of lost content, I see it shining plain, the happy highways where I went and cannot come again.

I wanted the monster back and that was plainly wrong.