It is possible to argue that the really influential book is not that which converts ten millions of casual readers, but rather that which converts the very few who, at any given moment, succeed in seizing power. Marx and Sorel have been influential in the modern world, not so much because they were best-sellers (Sorel in particular was not at all a widely read author), but because among their few readers were two men, called respectively Lenin and Mussolini.

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

Death is the only thing we haven't succeeded in completely vulgarizing.

A majority of young people seem to develop mental arteriosclerosis forty years before they get the physical kind.

Human contacts have been so highly valued in the past only because reading was not a common accomplishment.... The world, you must remember, is only just becoming literate. As reading becomes more and more habitual and widespread, an ever-increasing number of people will discover that books will give them all the pleasures of social life and none of its intolerable tedium.

Successfully (whatever that may mean) or unsuccessfully, we all overact the part of our favorite character in fiction.

God: a gaseous vertebrate.