If men do not keep on speaking terms with children, they cease to be men, and become merely machines for eating and for earning money.

Among the repulsions of atheism for me has been its drastic uninterestingness as an intellectual position.

I think people do look to writers to tell the truth in a way that nobody else quite will, not politicians or ministers or sociologists. A writer's job, is to, by way of fiction, somehow describe the way we live. And to me, this seems an important task, very worth doing, and I think also, to the reading public, it seems, even though they might not articulate it, it seems to them something worth doing also.

Accent the ugly until it becomes gorgeous.

Money is like water in a leaky bucket: no sooner there, it begins to drip.

In general, the churches, visited by me often on weekdays... bore for me the same relation to God that billboards did to Coca-Cola; they promoted thirst without quenching it.

To be President of the United States, sir, is to act as advocate for a blind, venomous, and ungrateful client.