“Writers have a rare power not given to anyone else: we can bore people long after we are dead.”

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

Pugnacity is a form of courage, but a very bad form.

Good Lord, I don’t know what ‘rights’ a man has! And I don’t know the solution of boredom. If I did, I’d be the one philosopher that had the cure for living. But I do know that about ten times as many people find their lives dull, and unnecessarily dull.

It is no harder for anyone to test this than it is for me to say it is false, since no one is prevented from counting teeth.

I’m a father, a son, and a grandson, and if anyone messed with my wife, mom, or grandmother, and if the law didn’t care about it, what would I do? Would I be defined by that action?

Strength is not nearly as important as desire. I don’t think you can teach anyone desire. I think it’s a gift. I don’t know why I have it, but I do.

Anyway, I just haven’t been able to find any humanity in any Republican candidate ever in my entire life.

I’m not going to impugn anyone’s integrity. I’m not going to attack their character. And, in fact, I will happily praise both Donald Trump and Marco Rubio as men who I admire, as people who I’m not going to go personal with them.

Anyone else has to come upstairs and see the Shogun. I’m still the Shogun.

I have my ups and my downs like anyone. All I can do is be me.

Don’t let anyone turn you into a slave.