“I’ve got a new friend, all right. But what a gamble friendship is! Charlotte is fierce, brutal, scheming, bloodthirsty-everything I don’t like. How can I learn to like her, even though she is pretty and, of course, clever?”

Why did you do all this for me?’ he asked. ‘I don’t deserve it. I’ve never done anything for you.’ ‘You have been my friend,’ replied Charlotte. ‘That in itself is a tremendous thing.

You can dissect a joke just as you can a frog. But it tends to die on you.

I am always humbled by the infite ingenuity of the Lord, who can make a red barn cast a blue shadow.

A right is a responsibility in reverse.

Television will enormously enlarge the eye’s range, and, like radio, will advertise the Elsewhere. Together with the tabs, the mags, and the movies, it will insist that we forget the primary and the near in favor of the secondary and the remote.

To achieve style, begin by affecting none.

Sailors have an expression about the weather: they say the weather is a great bluffer. I guess the same is true of our human society – things can look dark, then a break shows in the clouds, and all is changed.

Children are game for anything. I throw them hard words, and they backhand them over the net. They love words that give them a hard time, provided they are in a context that absorbs their attention.

Writing is one way to go about thinking, and the practice and habit of writing not only drain the mind but supply it, too.

Loneliness is a strange gift.

Well,” said Stuart, “a misspelled word is an abomination in the sight of everyone.

The essayist is a self-liberated man, sustained by the childish belief that everything he thinks about, everything that happens to him, is of general interest.

The whole problem is to establish communication with ones self.

The city that is devoured by locusts each day and spat out each night. Third, there is the New York of the person who was born somewhere else and came to New York in quest of something.

I admire anybody who has the guts to write anything at all.

A good farmer is nothing more nor less than a handy man with a sense of humus.

If you have been brutally broken, but still have the courage to be gentle to other living beings, then you’re a badass with the heart of an angel.

I do not consider divorce an evil by any means. It is just as much a refuge for women married to brutal men as Canada was to the slaves of brutal masters.

Life is the most brutal endurance sport of all time.

Accumulation of wealth at one pole is at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole.

When somebody challenges you, fight back. Be brutal, be tough.

Concerning non-violence: it is criminal to teach a man not to defend himself when he is the constant victim of brutal attacks.

If someone puts their hands on you make sure they never put their hands on anybody else again.

Truly man is the king of beasts, for his brutality exceeds them. We live by the death of others. We are burial places.