the issue of war or peace is an issue that concerns not only experts on Foreign Affairs but every citizen of the United States.

... writing letters is thinking, just as talking to you is thinking.

How inexplicable it seems. Anything else will be accepted as a better excuse. If one sets aside time for a business appointment, a trip to the hairdresser, a social engagement or a shopping expedition, that time is accepted as inviolable. But if one says: I cannot come because that is my hour to be alone, one is considered rude, egotistical or strange.

Everything today has been heavy and brown. Bring me a Unicorn to ride about the town.

there is no sin punished more implacably by nature than the sin of resistance to change.

In general, I feel, or I have come to feel, that the richest writing comes not from the people who dedicate themselves to writing alone. I know this is contradicted again and again but I continue to feel it. They don't, of course, write as much, or as fast, but I think it is riper and more satisfying when it does come. One of the difficulties of writing or doing any kind of creative work in America seems to me to be that we put such stress on production and material results. We put a time pressure and a mass pressure on creative work which are meaningless and infantile in that field.

To give without any reward, or any notice, has a special quality of its own.