Who can confidently say what ignites a certain combination of words, causing them to explode in the mind? Who knows why certain notes in music are capable of stirring the listener deeply, though the same notes slightly rearranged are impotent? These are high mysteries, and this chapter is a mystery story, thinly disguised.

Security, for me, took a tumble not when I read that there were Communists in Hollywood but when I read your editorial in praise of loyalty testing and thought control. If a man is in health, he doesn't need to take anybody else's temperature to know where he is going.

Humour plays close to the big, hot fire, which is the truth, and the reader feels the heat.

I don't understand it, and I don't like what I don't understand.

No one can write decently who is distrustful of the reader's intelligence or whose attitude is patronizing.

When my wife's Aunt Caroline was in her nineties, she lived with us, and she once remarked: 'Remembrance is sufficient of the beauty we have seen.' I cherish the remembrance of the beauty I have seen. I cherish the grave, compulsive word.

Whatever else an American believes or disbelieves about himself, he is absolutely sure he has a sense of humor.