When I face the desolate impossibility of writing five hundred pages, a sick sense of failure falls on me, and I know I can never do it. Then gradually, I write one page and then another. One day's work is all I can permit myself to contemplate.

The bank is something more than men, I tell you. It's the monster. Men made it, but they can't control it.

The craft of writing is the art of penetrating other minds with the figures that are in your own mind.

Critics are the eunuchs of literature. They stand by in envious awe while the whole man and his partner demonstrate the art of living.

The proofs that God does not exist are very strong, but in lots of people they are not as strong as the feeling that He does.

It is the nature of man to rise to greatness if greatness is expected of him.

And when that crop grew, and was harvested, no man had crumbled a hot clod in his fingers and let the earth sift past his fingertips. No man had touched the seed, or lusted for the growth. Men ate what they had not raised, had no connection with the bread. The land bore under iron, and under iron gradually died; for it was not loved or hated, it had no prayers or curses.