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

You,” Said Dr. Yavitch, “are a middle-road liberal, and you haven’t the slightest idea what you want.

It isn’t what you earn but how spend it that fixes your class.

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 believe I would rather have Stieglitz like something – anything I had done – than anyone else I know.

Cats on the bandstand, give them each a big hand, anyone who sweats like that must be all right.

Anyone who doesn’t feel the crosses simply doesn’t get that country.

I have things in my head that are not like what anyone has taught me – shapes and ideas so near to me – so natural to my way of being and thinking that it hasn’t occurred to me to put them down.

I would never do a commercial if I thought it was offensive to anyone.

I never met anyone who didn’t have a very smart child. What happens to these children, you wonder, when they reach adulthood?

I can take more punishment than anyone in the business.

Never give anyone the advice to buy or sell shares, because the most benevolent price of advice can turn out badly.