For every traveller who has any taste of his own, the only useful guidebook will be the one which he himself has written.

Nothing is more dreadful than a cold, unimpassioned indulgence. And love infallibly becomes cold and unimpassioned when it is too lightly made.

I have discovered the most exciting, the most arduous literary form of all, the most difficult to master, the most pregnant in curious possibilities. I mean the advertisement. It is far easier to write ten passably effective Sonnets, good enough to take in the not too inquiring critic, than one effective advertisement that will take in a few thousand of the uncritical buying public.

What’s the point of truth or beauty or knowledge when anthrax bombs are popping all around you?

To those who think that liberty is a good thing, and that it may someday be possible for people to live in a society fit for free, fully human individuals, a thorough education in the nature of language, its uses and abuses, seems indispensable.

Proverbs are always platitudes until you have personally experienced the truth of them.

At their first appearance innovators have always been derided as fools and mad men.