“He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary.”

The problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat

No one is without Christianity, if we agree on what we mean by that word. It is every individual’s individual code of behavior by means of which he makes himself a better human being than his nature wants to be, if he followed his nature only.

I don’t want money badly enough to work for it.

To live anywhere in the world today and be against equality because of race or color is like living in Alaska and being against snow.

I believe man will not merely endure, he will prevail…because he has a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.

The good artist believes that nobody is good enough to give him advice. He has supreme vanity. No matter how much he admires the old writer, he wants to beat him.

Whatever its symbol – cross or crescent or whatever – that symbol is man’s reminder of his duty inside the human race.

Nothing can destroy the good writer. The only thing that can alter the good writer is death.

The young writer would be a fool to follow a theory. Teach yourself by your own mistakes; people learn only by error.

The books I read are the ones I knew and loved when I was a young man and to which I return as you do to old friends.

No man can cause more grief than that one clinging blindly to the vices of his ancestors.

A man is the sum of his misfortunes.

The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life.

Perhaps they were right putting love into books. Perhaps it could not live anywhere else.

If we in America have reached that point in our desperate culture when we must murder children, no matter for what reason or what color, we don’t deserve to survive, and probably won’t.

Remember, all Tolstoy ever said to describe Anna Karenina was that she was beautiful and could see in the dark like a cat. Every man has a different idea of what’s beautiful, and it’s best to take the gesture, the shadow of the branch, and let the mind create the tree.