“There is no way of writing well and also of writing easily.”

Poverty, to be picturesque, should be rural. Suburban misery is as hideous as it is pitiable.

It is very hard, that necessity of listening to a man who says nothing

Many people talk much, and then very many people talk very much more.

No other American city is so intensely American as New York.

Three hours a day will produce as much as a man ought to write.

Speeches easy to young speakers are generally very difficult to old listeners.

It lasts when all other pleasures fade. It will support you when all other recreations are gone. It will last until your death. It will make your hours pleasant to you as long as you live.

Romance is very pretty in novels, but the romance of a life is always a melancholy matter. They are most happy who have no story to tell.

That I can read and be happy while I am reading, is a great blessing.

Late hours, nocturnal cigars, and midnight drinkings, pleasurable though they may be, consume too quickly the free-flowing lamps of youth, and are fatal at once to the husbanded candle-ends of age.

When the little dog snarls, the big dog does not connect the snarl with himself, simply fancying that the little dog must be uncomfortable.

I hold that gentleman to be the best-dressed whose dress no one observes.

When once a woman is married she should be regarded as having thrown off her allegiance to her own sex. She is sure to be treacherous at any rate in one direction.

He should be cautious but never timid, bold but never venturesome; he should have a good digestion, genial manners, and, above all, a thick skin.

What is there that money will not do?

People will take you very much at your own reckoning.

But now, I am also learning this: we can be mended. We mend each other.

No one ever found wisdom without also being a fool. Writers, alas, have to be fools in public, while the rest of the human race can cover its tracks.

The parenting style that is good for grit is also the parenting style good for most other things: Be really, really demanding, and be very, very supportive.

With ‘Lady Macbeth,’ I had two other things offered to me, and they would have also been very fun, but you just have to figure that out. And then you do it.

I feel strongly, because a man who will himself die one day in the not to distant future and, also, as a psychiatrist who spent decades dealing with death anxiety, that confronting death allows us, not to open some noisome.

For many, Christmas is also a time for coming together. But for others, service will come first.

I’m Japanese, and I’m also white American, and neither camp wants me in their camp.

My husband always felt that a marriage and career don’t mix. That’s why he’s never worked.