The door available to everyone that can lead to happiness & success is the modest door of the public library. I found it to be so in my own life and work.

Let us fill a cup and drink to that most noble, ridiculous, laughable, sublime figure in our lives... The Young Man Who Was. Let us drink to his dreams, for they were rainbow-colored; to his appetites, for they were strong; to his blunders, for they were huge; to his pains for they were sharp; to his time for it was brief; and to his end, for it was to become one of us.

We are in the black theater of nonexistence. In an eye blink the curtain is up, the stage ablaze, for the vast drama of ourselves.

I regard the writing of humor as a supreme artistic challenge.

The American people are not cowardly. But, living in prosperous isolation, they have been the spoiled children of modern history.

Illusion is an anodyne, bred by the gap between wish and reality.

A writer is nothing but a gray dirt-covered root. The works he sends up into the sunlight are his fruits, and only those are worthy of attention.