“it’s not my job to preach a sermon. Art is anyhow a homily. My job is to speak in living images, not in arguments. I must exhibit life full-face, not discuss life.”

Always think of what is useful and not what is beautiful. Beauty will come of its own accord.

The more debris there is the more it will show the governor’s activity.

A time of famine and poverty will come and the people as a whole as well as every individual in it will suffer.

Sank into the profound slumber which comes only to such fortunate folk as are troubled neither with mosquitoes nor fleas nor excessive activity of brain.

Also, though not over-elderly, he was not over-young.

There are occasions when a woman, no matter how weak and impotent in character she may be in comparison with a man, will yet suddenly become not only harder than any man, but even harder than anything and everything in the world.

It is no use to blame the looking glass if your face is awry.

The Lord grant we may all be tillers of the soil.

Whatever you may say, the body depends on the soul.

I am who I am and that’s who I am.

I am fated to journey hand in hand with my strange heroes and to survey the surging immensity of life, to survey it through the laughter that all can see and through the tears unseen and unknown by anyone.

It’s the most righteous, which of course is not the same thing as the most profitable.

The longer and more carefully we look at a funny story, the sadder it becomes.

Do we ever get what we really want? Do we ever achieve what our powers have ostensibly equipped us for? No: everything works by contraries.

What are you laughing at? You are laughing at yourself.

Countless as the sands of sea are human passions, and not all of them are alike, and all of them, base and noble alike, are at first obedient to man and only later on become his terrible masters.

But now, instead of discussion and argument

I discuss with myself questions of politics, love, taste, or philosophy. I let my mind rove wantonly, give it free rein to followany idea, wise or mad that may present itself. My ideas are my harlots.

Discussion in America means dissent.

The spearhead of progress. If they are fundamentally wrong, free discussion will in time put an end to them.

A discussion should be a genuine attempt to explore a subject rather than a battle between competing egos.

Although feelings are not supposed to intrude on business discussions, they do anyway – we just disguise them as logic.

Few sensible authors are happy discussing the creative process–it is, after all, black magic.

I come here to speak poetry. It will always be in the grass. It will also be necessary to bend down to hear it. It will always be too simple to be discussed in assemblies.