“Vast is the power of cities to reclaim the wanderer.”

To live in Carlsbad is seemly and to loaf at San Remo healing to the soul, but to get from Carlsbad to San Remo is of the devil.

If there is anything worse than the aching tedium of staring out of car windows.

I have faith in Faith, I have reverence for all true Reverence.

I have for myself no conceivable complaint to make, and yet for American literature in general, and its standing in a country where industrialism and finance and science flourish and the only arts that are vital and respected are architecture and the film, I have a considerable complaint.

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.

Upon this theology he rarely pondered. The kernel of his practical religion was that it was respectable, and beneficial to one’s business, to be seen going to services; that the church kept the Worst Elements from being still worse.

The Maker of the universe with stars a hundred thousand light-years apart was interested, furious, and very personal about it if a small boy played baseball on Sunday afternoon.

She did her work with the thoroughness of a mind which reveres details and never quite understands them.

The one thing that can be more disconcerting than intelligent hatred is demanding love.

Don’t be a writer. Writing is an escape from something. You be a scientist.

Thus Carol hit upon the tragedy of old age, which is not that it is less vigorous than youth, but that it is not needed by youth.

Funny how the world always praises its opera-singers so much and pays ’em so well and then starves its shoemakers, and yet it needs good shoes so much more than it needs opera–or war or fiction.

Winter is not a season, it’s an occupation.

The middle class, that prisoner of the barbarian 20th century.

Most troubles are unnecessary. We have Nature beaten; we can make her grow wheat; we can keep warm when she sends blizzards. So we raise the devil just for pleasure–wars, politics, race-hatreds, labor-disputes.

I can not understand why ministers presume to deliver sermons every week at appointed hours because it is humanly impossible for inspirations to come with clock-like regularity

I go through about 140 cities a year.

Kuwait City is not gorgeous, actually, but it’s got a kind of Epcot Center thing going for it. It’s not pretty. But it’s striking, I’ll give it that. It’s not as over-the-top as Abu Dhabi or Dubai. But nearly.

Not since Ancient Greece have cities been thought of as the ideal living environment for humans. And that was so long ago it predates the invention of trousers.

A man of strong opinions is one thing. But a man whose strong opinions depend entirely on how he is feeling in that instant is a disastrous thing in a city of 10 million people just trying to muddle through.

In the beginning, we huddled in cities for our own protection.

I tried to leave the city once, for one of those other places. And, my God, the silence. I could hear myself think, and found that I wasn’t. I am not designed to be lonely as a cloud.

A city involves biomass. And biomass gets to me.

As drivers desert the city I find myself clinging more and more to my father’s belief that a man without a car is not really a man.