It is easy to convince a man who already thinks as you do.

... beauty, like ecstasy, has always been hostile to the commonplace. And the commonplace, under its popular label of the normal,has been the supreme authority for Homo sapiens since the days when he was probably arboreal.

...America has enjoyed the doubtful blessing of a single-track mind. We are able to accommodate, at a time, only one national hero; and we demand that that hero shall be uniform and invincible. As a literate people we are preoccupied, neither with the race nor the individual, but with the type. Yesterday, we romanticized the "tough guy;" today, we are romanticizing the underprivileged, tough or tender; tomorrow, we shall begin to romanticize the pure primitive.

America has enjoyed the doubtful blessing of a single-track mind.

Though it sounds absurd, it is true to say I felt younger at sixty than I felt at twenty.

I have written chiefly because, though I have often dreaded the necessity, I have found it more painful, in the end, not to write.

to be honest and yet popular is almost as difficult in literature as it is in life.