The mind of a generation is its speech. A writer makes aspects of that speech enduring by putting them in print. He whittles at the words and phrases of today and makes of them forms to set the mind of tomorrow's generation. That's history. A writer who writes straight is the architect of history.

That's the great danger of sectarian opinions, they always accept the formulas of past events as useful for the measurement of future events and they never are, if you have high standards of accuracy.

If there is a special Hades for writers is would be in the forced contemplation of their own works.

If I were sufficiently romantic I suppose I'd have killed myself long ago just to make people talk about me. I haven't even got the conviction to make a successful drunkard.

It's rather grisly, isnt it, how soon a living man becomes nothing more than a collection of stocks and bonds and debts and real estate?

The fascinating thing to a dispassionate observer about the structure of life in the Soviet Union is that in their efforts to produce an unknown that we may let its ideologists call Socialism the Communist dictators have produced a brutal approximation of monopoly Capitalism, a system that has all the disadvantages of our own, with none of the palliatives which come to us from surviving competition and from the essential division of economic and political power which has so far made it possible for the humane traditions of the Western world to continue.

We work to eat to get the strength to work to eat to get the strength to work.