A satirist is a man whose flesh creeps so at the ugly and the savage and the incongruous aspects of society that he has to express them as brutally and nakedly as possible in order to get relief.

U.S.A. is the speech of the people

Women alone always order sole. It means something.

The mind cannot support moral chaos for long. Men are under as strong a compulsion to invent an ethical setting for their behavior as spiders are to weave themselves webs

Individuality is freedom lived.

It was the ponderous battering ram of his novels that opened the way through the genteel reticences of American nineteenth-century fiction. . . Without [Theodore] Dreiser's treading out a path for naturalism none of us would have had a chance to publish.

Breaking with old friends is one of the most painful of the changes in all that piling up of a multitude of small distasteful changes that constitutes growing older.