Neither man nor God is going to tell me what to write.

Life is sad enough without people writing sad books.

America is so vast that almost everything said about it is likely to be true, and the opposite is probably equally true.

Studs Lonigan, on the verge of fifteen, and wearing his first suit of long trousers, stood in the bathroom with a Sweet Caporal pasted on his mug.

In New Haven, Conn., when I was growing up, there were two sorts of Irish. There were the "drugstore cowboy" micks, who hung around the Elm Street poolroom over Longley's Lunch. And there were the earnest young Irishmen who fought their way up from the Grand Avenue saloonkeeper backgrounds of their fathers, went through Yale Law School, and have now found high place by the preferment of local politics or in the teaching profession.

Fitzgerald describes the social disillusionments and ballroom romanticism of the young people of the upper classes and the loneliness of Gatsby, who gives large parties and has an extensive social life; yet he is lonely, and his guests scarcely know him.... Hemingway's characters live in a tourist world, and one of their major problems is that of consuming time itself. It is interesting to observe that his works are written from the stand point of the spectator. His characters are usually people who are looking--looking at bullfights, scenery, and at one another across cafe tables.

If you let conditions stop you from working, they'll always stop you.