“People read fiction for emotion-not information”

Fine, large, meaningless, general terms like romance and business can always be related. They take the place of thinking, and are highly useful to optimists and lecturers.

You’ve been telling us about how to secure peace, but come on, now, General-just among us Rotarians and Rotary Anns-‘fess up!

Emotionally I know she is better than every other country.

I must say I’m not very fond of oratory that’s so full of energy it hasn’t any room for facts.

You have more people that love you than you know.

One quarter are afraid to speak, and one quarter are killed and you die with them. But the blessed final quarter keep you alive.

Intellectually I know that America is no better than any other country.

As ever admit it; and I do believe that if we busted out and admitted it sometimes, instead of being nice and patient and loyal for sixty years, and then nice and patient and dead for the rest of eternity, why, maybe, possibly, we might make life more fun.

Life is hard and astonishingly complicated…. No one great reform will make it easy.

You’re so earnest about morality that I hate to think how essentially immoral you must be underneath.

I’ve heard of their curing syphilis by giving the patient malaria, but I’ve never heard of their curing malaria by giving the patient syphilis.

I love America, but I don’t like it.

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

He loved the people just as much as he feared and detested persons.

So much in a revolution is nothing but waiting.

Love is the one thing that can really sure-enough lighten all of life’s dark clouds.

I do the interviews and then I read about myself. I understand it and I get what it is. But there’s so much stuff that I say, either jokingly or lightheartedly, that gets printed like I’m dead serious.

I had a nice read on the putt and I said to myself, ‘This is for you, Jesus, ‘ and knocked it in.

I’m not a fan of ‘write what you know.’ If you don’t know, find out. I knew nothing about the Bible before I started writing ‘The Year of Living Biblically.’ That was kind of the point – to learn.

From the time I read my first Hemingway work, The Sun Also Rises, as a student at Soldan High School in St. Louis, I was struck with an affliction common to my generation: Hemingway Awe.

My reading list grows exponentially. Every time I read a book, it’ll mention three other books I feel I have to read. It’s like a particularly relentless series of pop-up ads.

True glory consists in doing what deserves to be written, and writing what deserves to be read.

However, if I shall live to be eighty I shall probably be the only person left in England who reads anything but newspapers and scientific publications.

Books are the basis; purity is the force; preaching is the essence; utility is the principle.