“We care what happens to people only in proportion as we know what people are.”

You were ground in the very mill of the conventional.

I would give all I possess to get out of myself; but somehow, at the end, I find myself so vastly more interesting than nine tenths of the people I meet.

True happiness, we are told, consists in getting out of one’s self; but the point is not only to get out – you must stay out; and to stay out you must have some absorbing errand.

I take up my own pen again – the pen of all my old unforgettable efforts and sacred struggles.

Ideas are, in truth, forces. Infinite, too, is the power of personality. A union of the two always makes history.

if you are going to be pushed you had better jump

To myself – today – I need say no more. Large and full and high the future still opens. It is now indeed that I may do the work of my life. And I will.

I have performed the necessary butchery. Here is the bleeding corpse.

Criticism talks a good deal of nonsense, but even its nonsense is a useful force. It keeps the question of art before the world, insists upon its importance.

All intimacies are based on differences.

Three things in human life are important. The first is to be kind. The second is to be kind. And the third is to be kind.

If this was love, love had been overrated.

To take what there is in life and use it, without waiting forever in vain for the preconceived, to dig deep into the actual and get something out of that; this, doubtless, is the right way to live.

To establish in fine a relation with the criticized thing and to make it one’s own.

Make the short story tremendously succinct – with a very short pulse or rhythm – and the closest selection of detail.

Don’t pass it by – the immediate, the real, the ours, the yours, the novelist’s that it waits for.

I do know this: God does answer your prayers, but it’s not always in the way you expect.

Wit is a dangerous weapon, even to the possessor, if he knows not how to use it discreetly.

People say you have to know when to retire, which is a dumb thing to say. If you want to go out on top, yeah, it becomes important when you quit. But I wasn’t afraid of that. And I wasn’t worried about getting fired.

As a Christian, I know my life is in God’s hands. He has a plan for me.

I don’t believe in team motivation. I believe in getting a team prepared so it knows it will have the necessary confidence when it steps on a field and be prepared to play a good game.

Man knows so much and does so little.

Been in this game one-hundred years, but I see new ways to lose ’em I never knew existed before.

You don’t know where you’re swimming to. Everything’s blurry.