“His name was George F. Babbitt, and . . . he was nimble in the calling of selling houses for more than people could afford to pay.”

The game (baseball)was a custom of his clan, and it gave outlet for the homicidal and sides-taking instincts which Babbitt called “patriotism” and “love of sport.”

Writers kid themselves-about themselves and other people. Take the talk about writing methods.

In other countries, art and literature are left to a lot of shabby bums living in attics and feeding on booze and spaghetti, but in America the successful writer or picture-painter is indistinguishable from any other decent businessman.

You,” Said Dr. Yavitch, “are a middle-road liberal, and you haven’t the slightest idea what you want.

It isn’t what you earn but how spend it that fixes your class.

God has never done much but creep around and try to catch us disobeying it.

I was brought up to believe that the Christian God wasn’t a scared and compromising public servant, but the creator of the whole merciless truth, and I reckon that training spoiled me – I actually took my teachers seriously!

It is impossible to discourage the real writers – they don’t give a damn what you say, they’re going to write.

Every compulsion is put upon writers to become safe, polite, obedient, and sterile.

Illuminating and making glad again the dark clouds of life. It is the morning and the evening star, that in glad refulgence, there on the awed horizon, call Nature’s hearts to an uplifted rejoicing in God’s marvelous firmament!

There are two insults which no human being will endure: The assertion that he hasn’t a sense of humor, and the doubly impertinent assertion that he has never known trouble.

There are dozens of young poets and fictioneers most of them a little insane in the tradition of James Joyce, who, however insane they may be, have refused to be genteel and traditional and dull.

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.

Winter is not a season in the North Middlewest; it is an industry.

Whatever the misery, he could not regain contentment with a world which, once doubted, became absurd.

People read fiction for emotion-not information

Those who have more power are liable to sin more; no theorem in geometry is more certain than this.

No kind of sensation is keener and more active than that of pain its impressions are unmistakable.

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.

I definitely have plans to do more collaboration albums in the future.

If you want respect for your past, it means that you have a problem with your present and even more with your future.

Genius is more often found in a cracked pot than in a whole one.

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.

…the essence of gospel-humility is not thinking more of myself or thinking less of myself, it is thinking of myself less.