“That nation is proudest and noblest and most exalted which has the greatest number of really great men.”

The world and all its wisdom is but a booby, blundering school-boy that needs management and could be managed.

Why is it that traveling Americans are always so dreadful?

To be ‘intellectual’ or ‘artistic’ or, in their own word, to be ‘highbrow,’ is to be priggish and of dubious virtue.

A man takes a drink, the drink takes another, and the drink takes the man.

Most of us who work — or want to work — will always have trouble or discontent. So we must learn to be calm, and train all our faculties, and make others happy.

My chief objection is that 99% of sermons and Sunday School teachings are so agonizingly dull.

To a true-blue professor of literature in an American university, literature is not something that a plain human being, living today, painfully sits down to produce. No; it is something dead.

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

Vast is the power of cities to reclaim the wanderer.

The greatest mystery about a human being is not his reaction to sex or praise, but the manner in which he contrives to put in twenty-four hours a day. It is this which puzzles the longshoreman about the clerk, the Londoner about the bushman.

But the men of ritual and the men of barbarism are capable of shutting up the men of science and silencing them forever.

If travel were so inspiring and informing a business … then the wisest men in the world would be deck hands on tramp steamers.

There are so many people in the world who are eager to do for you things that you do not wish done, provided only that you will do for them things that you don’t wish to do.

In protest, I declined election to the National Institute of Arts and Letters some years ago, and now I must decline the Pulitzer Prize.

Except for half a dozen in each town the citizens are proud of that achievement of ignorance which is so easy to come by.

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.

The fans out in New Zealand are amazing. They’re genuinely excited and appreciative that you’re playing their country.

I wasn’t too excited about school, I’m not going to lie.

I think there’s this general hunger for greater diversity, where publishers are really excited about finding different voices than what has been done.

For me, like, the more interesting a letter is I just get more excited and I know that this going to be great for my friends who are looking forward to reading that in my comic.

And when you perform and create this story, they’re chuffed – they get excited, they capture it, and they put it out.

Blanket cynicism toward government has always existed.

My teaching was animated by what I was reading and being excited by as a poet.

Those shows I did with Queen were pretty surreal. I was really excited and super-flattered, but intimidated at the same time.