I just couldn't make the grade as a hack-that, like everything else, requires a certain practiced excellence.

Young people do not perceive at once that the giver of wounds is the enemy and the quoted tattle merely the arrow.

It's not a slam at you when people are rude, it's a slam at the people they've met before.

Great books write themselves, only bad books have to be written.

Cut out all these exclamation points. An exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke.

Even when everything seems rotten you can't trust that judgment. It's the sum of all your judgments that counts.

New York had all the iridescence of the beginning of the world.