In France one must adapt oneself to the fragrance of a urinal.

The difference between saints, forget-me-nots, and mountains, have to, have to, have to at a time.

Everywhere there was somewhere and everywhere there they were men women children dogs cows wild pigs little rabbits cats lizards and animals. That is the way it was. And everybody dogs cats sheep rabbits and lizards and children all wanted to tell ... all about themselves.

No one is ahead of his time, it is only that the particular variety of creating his time is the one that his contemporaries who are also creating their own time refuse to accept. For a very long time everybody refuses and then almost without a pause almost everybody accepts. In the history of the refused in the arts and literature the rapidity of the change is always startling.

If the communication is perfect, the words have life, and that is all there is to good writing, putting down on the paper words which dance and weep and make love and fight and kiss and perform miracles.

Is it worse to be scared than to be bored, that is the question.

Sinclair Lewis is the perfect example of the false sense of time of the newspaper world.... [ellipsis in source] He was always dominated by an artificial time when he wrote Main Street.... He did not create actual human beings at any time. That is what makes it newspaper. Sinclair Lewis is the typical newspaperman and everything he says is newspaper. The difference between a thinker and a newspaperman is that a thinker enters right into things, a newspaperman is superficial.