There is in every human being, I think, a native country of the mind, where, protected by inaccessible barriers, the sensitive dream life may exist safely.

...I had grown up in a world that was dominated by immature age. Not by vigorous immaturity, but by immaturity that was old and tired and prudent, that loved ritual and rubric, and was utterly wanting in curiosity about the new and the strange. Its era has passed away, and the world it made has crumbled around us. Its finest creation, a code of manners, has been ridiculed and discarded.

irony is an indispensable ingredient of the critical vision; it is the safest antidote to sentimental decay.

To a thrifty theologian, bent on redemption with economy, there are few points of ethics too fine-spun for splitting.

I haven't much opinion of words. They're apt to set fire to a dry tongue, that's what I say.

My first reading of Tolstoy affected me as a revelation from heaven, as the trumpet of the judgment. What he made me feel was notthe desire to imitate, but the conviction that imitation was futile.

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