When a deposit bottle is broken, you don't get your nickel back.

Immortality is like trying to carve your initials in a block of ice in the middle of July.

The writer must be in it; he can't be to one side of it, ever. He has to be endangered by it. His own attitudes have to be tested in it. The best work that anybody ever writes is the work that is on the verge of embarrassing himself, always.

PROCTOR, his mind wild, breathless: I say--I say--God is dead!

I have made more friends for American culture than the State Department. Certainly I have made fewer enemies, but that isn't very difficult.

...an everlasting funeral marches round your heart.

There is a misconception of tragedy with which I have been struck in review after review, and in many conversations with writers and readers alike. It is the idea that tragedy is of necessity allied to pessimism.