When you clean up a city, you destroy it.

magic persists without us no matter what we may do to try to spoil it

it seemed to me that I had never met another person on earth as discouraging to my happiness as my father. and it appeared that I had the same effect upon him.

Not everybody thought they could be a dentist or an automobile mechanic but everybody knew they could be a writer.

I am ashamed to be a member of the human race but I don't want to add any more to that shame, I want to scrape a little of it off.

Dear child, I only did to you what the sparrow did to you; I am old when it is fashionable to be young; I cry when it is fashionable to laugh. I hated you when it would have taken less courage to love.

I hid in bars, because I didn't want to hide in factories.