In this world, either you're virtuous or you enjoy yourself. Not both, lady, not both.

If [people] place such things as friendship and family ties above their own productive work, yes, then they are immoral. Friendship, family life and human relationships are not primary in a man's life. A man who places others first, above his own creative work, is an emotional parasite.

Style is not an end in itself, it is only a means to an end - the means of telling a story.

What is kinder--to believe the best of people and burden them with a nobility beyond their endurance--or to see them as they are, and accept it because it makes them comfortable?

When you have civilized men fighting savages, you support the civilized men, no matter who they are.

Many words have been granted me, and some are wise, and some are false, but only three are holy: "I will it!

I do not think that tragedy is our natural fate and I do not live in chronic dread of disaster. It is no happiness, but suffering that I consider unnatural. It is not success, but calamity that I regard as the abnormal exception in Human Life.