“A good story is like a bitter pill, with the sugar coating inside of it.”

What is the world at its best but a little round field of the moving pictures with two walking together in it?

If a person has lived through war, poverty and love, he has lived a full life.

The true adventurer goes forth aimless and uncalculating to meet and greet unknown fate.

Now, girls, if you want to observe a young man hustle out after a pick and shovel, just tell him that your heart is in some other fellow’s grave. Young men are grave-robbers by nature.

Bride knoweth bride at the glance of an eye. And between them swiftly passes comfort and meaning in a language that man and widows wot not of.

There is this difference between the grief of youth and that of old age; youth’s burden is lightened by as much of it as another shares; old age may give and give, but the sorrow remains the same.

I’ve got some of my best yarns from park benches, lamp posts and newspaper stands.

This fair but pitiless city of Manhattan was without a soul its inhabitants were manikins moved by wires and springs.

He studied cities as women study their reflections.

There is one day that is ours. Thanksgiving Day is the one day that is purely American.

You can’t appreciate home till you’ve left it, money till it’s spent, your wife till she’s joined a woman’s club, nor Old Glory till you see it hanging on a broomstick on the shanty of a consul in a foreign town.

Each of us, when our day’s work is done, must seek our ideal, whether it be love or pinochle or lobster à la Newburg, or the sweet silence of the musty bookshelves.

History is bright and fiction dull with homely men who have charmed women.

Men to whom life had appeared as a reversible coat – seamy on both sides.

When a man begins to be hilarious in a sorrowful way you can bet a million that he is dyeing his hair.

He seemed to be made of sunshine and blood-red tissue and clear weather.

What is the worst is a fashion designer who talks all the time of his or her creativity, what they are, how they evolved. Just do it and shut up.

Creativity is the encounter of the intensively conscious human being with his world.

Responsibility is what awaits outside the Eden of Creativity.

Creativity arises out of the tension between spontaneity and limitations, the latter (like the river banks) forcing the spontaneity into the various forms which are essential to the work of art or poem.

Creativity is the process of bringing something new into being. Creativity requires passion and commitment. It brings to our awareness what was previously hidden and points to new life. The experience is one of heightened consciousness: ecstasy.

I don’t think I have the kind of creativity to write fiction.

The creative union of the conscious with the unconscious is what one usually calls ‘inspiration.’

Classes will dull your mind, destroy the potential for authentic creativity.