If you want to be a psychological novelist and write about human beings, the best thing you can do is keep a pair of cats.

What a gulf between impression and expression! That’s our ironic fate—to have Shakespearean feelings and (unless by some billion-to-one chance we happen to be Shakespeare) to talk about them like automobile salesmen or teen-agers or college professors. We practice alchemy in reverse—touch gold and it turns into lead; touch the pure lyrics of experience, and they turn into the verbal equivalents of tripe and hogwash.

he had been making an unsuccessful effort to write something about nothing in particular

The charm of history and its enigmatic lesson consist in the fact that, from age to age, nothing changes and yet everything is completely different.

There is something curiously boring about somebody else's happiness.

Every ceiling reached becomes a floor.

Every ceiling, when reached, becomes a floor, upon which one walks as a matter of course and prescriptive right