“We have the plans for a Utopia already made; just wiser than you.’ For ten thousand years they’ve said that. We want our Utopia now — and we’re going to try our hands at it.”

God has never done much but creep around and try to catch us disobeying it.

I was brought up to believe that the Christian God wasn’t a scared and compromising public servant, but the creator of the whole merciless truth, and I reckon that training spoiled me – I actually took my teachers seriously!

It is impossible to discourage the real writers – they don’t give a damn what you say, they’re going to write.

Every compulsion is put upon writers to become safe, polite, obedient, and sterile.

Illuminating and making glad again the dark clouds of life. It is the morning and the evening star, that in glad refulgence, there on the awed horizon, call Nature’s hearts to an uplifted rejoicing in God’s marvelous firmament!

There are two insults which no human being will endure: The assertion that he hasn’t a sense of humor, and the doubly impertinent assertion that he has never known trouble.

There are dozens of young poets and fictioneers most of them a little insane in the tradition of James Joyce, who, however insane they may be, have refused to be genteel and traditional and dull.

His name was George F. Babbitt, and . . . he was nimble in the calling of selling houses for more than people could afford to pay.

Damn the great executives, the men of measured merriment, damn the men with careful smiles, damn the men that run the shops, oh, damn their measured merriment.

Winter is not a season in the North Middlewest; it is an industry.

Whatever the misery, he could not regain contentment with a world which, once doubted, became absurd.

People read fiction for emotion-not information

Paris is one of the largest, and certainly it is the pleasantest, of modern American cities.

So that the thrifty and industrious have to pay for the shiftless ne’er-do-weels, then maybe, to save their lazy souls and get some iron into them, a war might be a good thing? Come on, now, tell your real middle name, Mong General!

I think perhaps we want a more conscious life. We’re tired of drudging and sleeping and dying.

She was snatched back from a dream of far countries, and found herself on Main Street.