Writers write to influence their readers, their preachers, their auditors, but always, at bottom, to be more themselves.

Higher education is not necessarily a guarantee of higher virtue.

I met, not long ago, a young man who aspired to become a novelist. Knowing that I was in the profession, he asked me to tell him how he should set to work to realize his ambition. I did my best to explain. 'The first thing,' I said, 'is to buy quite a lot of paper, a bottle of ink, and a pen. After that you merely have to write.'

Every civilization is, among other things, an arrangement for domesticating the passions and setting them to do useful work.

Every idol, however exalted, turns out, in the long run, to be a Moloch, hungry for human sacrifice.

Ignore death up to the last moment; then, when it can't be ignored any longer, have yourself squirted full of morphia and shuffle off in a coma. Thoroughly sensible, humane and scientific, eh?

What is absurd and monstrous about war is that men who have no personal quarrel should be trained to murder one another in cold blood.