I would really rather feel bad in Maine than feel good anywhere else

In the nature of things, a person engaged in the flimsy business of expressing himself on paper is dependent on the large general privilege of being heard. Any intimation that this privilege may be revoked throws a writer into panic.

A poem compresses much in a small space and adds music, thus heightening its meaning. The city is like poetry: it compresses all life, all races and breeds, into a small island and adds music and the accompaniment of internal engines. The island of Manhattan is without any doubt the greatest human concentrate on earth, the poem whose magic is comprehensible to millions of permanent residents but whose full meaning will always remain elusive.

Understanding humor is like dissecting a live frog. It can be done, but the frog tends to die in the process.

People are, if anything, more touchy about being thought silly than they are about being thought unjust.

Computing machines perhaps can do the work of a dozen ordinary men, but there is no machine that can do the work of one extraordinary man.

Life's accumulation is more discouraging than life itself, when stirred up.