“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.”

Americans will eat garbage provided you sprinkle it liberally with ketchup.

She is like a revolving lighthouse; pitch darkness alternating with a dazzling brilliancy!

A man who pretends to understand women is bad manners. For him to really to understand them is bad morals.

To believe in a child is to believe in the Future.

She had an unequalled gift, especially pen in hand, of squeezing big mistakes into small opportunities.

You must save what you can of your life; you musn’t lose it all simply because you’ve lost a part.

His beautiful, light imagination is the wing that on the autumn evening just brushes the dusky window.

It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.

Under certain circumstances there are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea.

One can’t judge till one’s forty; before that we’re too eager, too hard, too cruel, and in addition much too ignorant.

Don’t try so much to form your character – it’s like trying to pull open a tight, tender young rose.

The visible world is but man turned inside out that he may be revealed to himself.

I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of an artistic process.

Live all you can; it’s a mistake not to.

We work in the dark – we do what we can – we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.

He is the same old sausage, fizzing and sputtering in his own grease.

The amount which cannot be harnessed and domesticated, but insists on its own form of activity rather than one which is offered ready made, is the energy used for the creation of art.

Freedom is a loose leash, license to be different from your mother and still be loved…Freedom is…not insisting that your daughter share your limitations. Freedom also means letting your daughter reject you when she needs to and come back when she needs to. Freedom is unconditional love.

Many people are being persuaded that they cannot be considered intelligent or well educated if they insist on the doctrine of the verbal inspiration of the Book.

The media insists on taking what someone didn’t mean to say as being far closer to the truth than what they did.

Roxy Sorkin, your father just won the Academy Award. I’m going to have to insist on some respect from your guinea pig.

When I feel that something I’m writing is going well, everything in my life is good and the things in my life that aren’t good are completely manageable. If it’s not going well, Miss America could be standing there in a swimsuit handing me a nobel price and I wouldn’t be happy about it

Real education must ultimately be limited to men who insist on knowing, the rest is mere sheep-herding.

There is no such thing as repetition. Only insistance.