I want you to adore the Universe, to be easily delighted, but to be prompt as well with impatience with those artists who offend your own deep notions of what the Universe is or should be. ‘This above all ...’

I do not say that children at war do not die like men, if they have to die. To their everlasting honor and our everlasting shame, they do die like men, thus making possible the manly jubilation of patriotic holidays. But they are murdered children all the same.

Where's evil? It's that large part of every man that wants to hate without limit, that wants to hate with God on its side.

The hare of history once more overtakes the tortoise of art.

Sometimes I think it is a great mistake to have matter that can think and feel. It complains so.

Homo Americanus is going to go on speaking and writing the way he always has, no matter what dictionary he owns.

I couldn't survive my own pessimism if I didn't have some kind of sunny little dream.