“People read fiction for emotion-not information”

Funny how the world always praises its opera-singers so much and pays ’em so well and then starves its shoemakers, and yet it needs good shoes so much more than it needs opera–or war or fiction.

Winter is not a season, it’s an occupation.

The middle class, that prisoner of the barbarian 20th century.

Most troubles are unnecessary. We have Nature beaten; we can make her grow wheat; we can keep warm when she sends blizzards. So we raise the devil just for pleasure–wars, politics, race-hatreds, labor-disputes.

I can not understand why ministers presume to deliver sermons every week at appointed hours because it is humanly impossible for inspirations to come with clock-like regularity

Pugnacity is a form of courage, but a very bad form.

Good Lord, I don’t know what ‘rights’ a man has! And I don’t know the solution of boredom. If I did, I’d be the one philosopher that had the cure for living. But I do know that about ten times as many people find their lives dull, and unnecessarily dull.

The most important part of living is not the living but the pondering upon it.

The trouble with this country is that there are too many people going about saying, “The trouble with this country is….”

Every man is a king so long as he has someone to look down on.

Unhappy women are given to protecting their sensitiveness by cynical gossip, by whining, by high-church and new-thought religions, or by a fog of vagueness.

if men and women would be human beings instead of just business men, or plumbers, or army officers, or commuters, or educators, or authors, or clubwomen, or traveling salesmen, or Socialists, or Republicans, or Salvation Army leaders, or wearers of cloths.

When you think that most of us are doomed by divine grace to roast in hell, to say nothing of mortgages and hail and bad crops and extravagant womenfolks, ’tain’t any laughing matter!

People will buy anything that is one to a customer.

He who has seen one cathedral ten times has seen something; he who has seen ten cathedrals once has seen but little; and he who has spent half an hour in each of a hundred cathedrals has seen nothing at all.

A village in a country which is taking pains to become altogether standardized and pure, which aspires to succeed Victorian England as the chief mediocrity of the world, is no longer merely provincial, no longer downy and restful in its leaf-shadowed ignorance. It is a force seeking to conquer the earth.

I love to read poetry but I haven’t written anything that I’m willing to show anybody.

And pray, why would this number interest us?” “It is the only number that describes itself when you read it, ‘One zero, two ones, three twos, two threes’.

There is that lovely feeling of one reader telling another, ‘You must read this.’

Sandip Roy has broken new ground in this tale of the modern Indian family. A lovely read

I always wanted to be an artist, whatever that was, like other chicks want to be stewardesses. I read. I painted. I thought.

I read, I painted, I didn’t hate niggers.

The book that I shall make people read is the book of the heart, which holds the key to the mystery of life

The trade magazine and all was banned in my house. The first time I read a film magazine was when I was 18.