“Damn the great executives, the men of measured merriment, damn the men with careful smiles, damn the men that run the shops, oh, damn their measured merriment.”

Why is it that traveling Americans are always so dreadful?

To be ‘intellectual’ or ‘artistic’ or, in their own word, to be ‘highbrow,’ is to be priggish and of dubious virtue.

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.

Be very careful about your care.

And I’ve concluded, after careful consideration, that this person keeping score is me.

Be careful! Travel expands the mind and loosens the bowels.

Careful studies of cases dealing with supposed ‘mental disorder’ have at times revealed that many thought to be insane or warped in some fashion were actually simply highly sensitive individuals.

I am quite a spendthrift but just being careful because my family was not rich, was not a rich family.

What they suffered from was not mental debilitation, but personal and communal ignorance of psychic reality.

One has always got to be terribly careful, since the theater is made up of a whole bunch of prima donnas, not to let the distortions occur.

Be careful who you trust and tell your problems to.