“We’re tired of hearing politicians and priests and cautious reformers… coax us, ‘Be calm! Be patient! Wait!”

A man takes a drink, the drink takes another, and the drink takes the man.

Most of us who work — or want to work — will always have trouble or discontent. So we must learn to be calm, and train all our faculties, and make others happy.

My chief objection is that 99% of sermons and Sunday School teachings are so agonizingly dull.

To a true-blue professor of literature in an American university, literature is not something that a plain human being, living today, painfully sits down to produce. No; it is something dead.

Writers have a rare power not given to anyone else: we can bore people long after we are dead.

Vast is the power of cities to reclaim the wanderer.

The greatest mystery about a human being is not his reaction to sex or praise, but the manner in which he contrives to put in twenty-four hours a day. It is this which puzzles the longshoreman about the clerk, the Londoner about the bushman.

But the men of ritual and the men of barbarism are capable of shutting up the men of science and silencing them forever.

If travel were so inspiring and informing a business … then the wisest men in the world would be deck hands on tramp steamers.

There are so many people in the world who are eager to do for you things that you do not wish done, provided only that you will do for them things that you don’t wish to do.

In protest, I declined election to the National Institute of Arts and Letters some years ago, and now I must decline the Pulitzer Prize.

Except for half a dozen in each town the citizens are proud of that achievement of ignorance which is so easy to come by.

To live in Carlsbad is seemly and to loaf at San Remo healing to the soul, but to get from Carlsbad to San Remo is of the devil.

If there is anything worse than the aching tedium of staring out of car windows.

I have faith in Faith, I have reverence for all true Reverence.

I have for myself no conceivable complaint to make, and yet for American literature in general, and its standing in a country where industrialism and finance and science flourish and the only arts that are vital and respected are architecture and the film, I have a considerable complaint.

A person from Northern Ireland is naturally cautious.

If one is forever cautious, can one remain a human being?

In an economy that already has lost some momentum, one must remain alert to the possibility that greater caution and weakening asset values in financial markets could signal or precipitate an excessive softening in household and business spending.

Such caution seems especially warranted with regard to the sharp rise in equity prices during the past two years. These gains have obviously raised questions of sustainability.

Any onset of increased investor caution elevates risk premiums and, as a consequence, lowers asset values and promotes the liquidation of the debt that supported higher asset prices.

I`m very cautious and very concerned about what I have initially seen, but I also believe we`ve got to organize like we have never organized before.We talk about it, but realistically, we`ve got to organize at the grassroots level.

Take caution when declaring war because you may believe it will be easy, but war will always end in despair.

A lot of people characterize women as more cautious. I don’t think that’s an inappropriate characterization, but that’s not a natural thing we’re born with, it’s something that comes about.