It is good fiction, so largely ignored now, that brings us so much closer to the real facts.

Western man is schizophrenic.

In a world shaped and colored more and more by politicians, the nations meet politically, and hardly any other way to settle their differences.

There are plenty of clever young writers. But there is too much genius, not enough talent.

Man, the creature who knows he must die, who has dreams larger than his destiny, who is forever working a confidence trick on himself, needs an ally. Mine has been tobacco.

There is romance, the genuine glinting stuff, in typewriters, and not merely in their development from clumsy giants into agile dwarfs, but in the history of their manufacture, which is filled with raids, battles, lonely pioneers, great gambles, hope, fear, despair, triumph. If some of our novels could be written by the typewriters instead of on them, how much better they would be.

Living in an age of advertisement, we are perpetually disillusioned.