After all, the world is not our handiwork, and we are not responsible for what goes on in it, save within very narrow limits.

Such is the art of writing as Dreiser understands it and practices it--an endless piling up of minutiae, an almost ferocious tracking down of ions, electrons and molecules, an unshakable determination to tell it all. One is amazed by the mole-like diligence of the man, and no less by his exasperating disregard for the ease of his readers.

Our literature, despite several false starts that promised much, is chiefly remarkable, now as always, for its respectable mediocrity.

As long as you represent me as praising alcohol I shall not complain.

The essence of self-fulfillment and autonomous culture is an unshakable egotism.

One horse-laugh is worth ten thousand syllogisms. It is not only more effective; it is also vastly more intelligent.

The Puritan, of course, is not entirely devoid of aesthetic feeling. He has a taste for good form; he responds to style; he is even capable of something approaching a purely aesthetic emotion. But he fears this aesthetic emotion as an insinuating distraction from his chief business in life: the sober consideration of the all-important problem of conduct. Art is a temptation, a seduction, a Lorelei, and the Good Man may safely have traffic with it when it is broken to moral uses--in other words, when its innocence is pumped out of it, and it is purged of gusto.