I'm thoroughly convinced that editors don't help authors.

Only a jackass ever talks over his affairs with a woman, whether she be his sweetheart, wife, or sister, or mother.

I think the Negro people should feel secure enough by now to face a reasonable ridicule without terror. I am unalterably opposed to all efforts to put down free speech, whatever the excuse.

Without a doubt there are women who would vote intelligently. There are also men who knit socks beautifully.

If I had my way, any man guilty of golf would be barred from any public office in the United States and the families of the breed would be shipped off to the white slave corrals of Argentina.

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

At a time when the respectable bourgeois youngsters of my generation were college freshmen, oppressed by simian sophomores and affronted with balderdash daily and hourly by chalky pedagogues, I was at large in a wicked seaport of half a million people, with a front seat at every public show, as free of the night as of day, and getting earfuls of instruction in a hundred giddy arcana, none of them taught in schools.... [But] if I neglected the humanities, I was meanwhile laying in all the worldly wisdom of a police lieutenant, a bartender, a shyster lawyer, or a midwife.