When the typewriter stops in a New York office everybody's embarrassed; men start to quarrel or to make love to the stenographer or drop lighted cigarettes in the wastebasket.

It's almost worth having been in the army for the joy your freedom gives you

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.

Git an eyeful of cesspool alley the land of opportunity.

In a moment when criticism shows a singular dearth of direction every man has to be a law unto himself in matters of theatre, writing, and painting. While the American Mercury and the new Ford continue to spread a thin varnish of Ritz over the whole United States there is a certain virtue in being unfashionable.

The only way to find out anything about what kinds of lives people led in any given period is to tunnel into their records and to let them speak for themselves

But what's the good of freedom? What can you do with it? What one wants is to live well and have a beautiful house and be respected by people.