The Catholic Church is like a thick steak, a glass of red wine, and a good cigar.

Every true artist feels that he is touching transcendental truths; that his images are shadows of things seen through the veil.

The most extraordinary thing in the world is an ordinary man and an ordinary woman and their ordinary children.

I suppose every one must have reflected how primeval and how poetical are the things that one carries in one's pocket; the pocket-knife, for instance, the type of all human tools, the infant of the sword. Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about things in my pockets. But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is past.

Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.

A citizen can hardly distinguish between a tax and a fine, except that the fine is generally much lighter.

Bigotry is an incapacity to conceive seriously the alternative to a proposition.