Talent is extremely common. What is rare is the willingness to endure the life of the writer.

God Almighty Himself must have been hilarious when human beings so mingled iron and water and fire as to make a railroad train!

I've been living alone for so long, everything about me’s private. I’m surprised anyone’s able to understand a word I say.

...when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, present, and future, always have existed, always will exist.

When I write, I feel like an armless, legless man with a crayon in his mouth.

He was talking about the sign that said 'THE COMPLICATED FUTILITY OF IGNORANCE.' 'All knew was that I didn't want my daughter or anybody's child to see a message that negative every time she comes into the library,' he said. 'And then I found out it was you who was responsible for it.' 'What's so negative about it?' I said. 'What could be a more negative word than "futility"?' he said. '"Ignorance,"' I said.

The darkest secret of this country, I am afraid, is that too many of its citizens imagine that they belong to a much higher civilization somewhere else. That higher civilization doesn’t have to be another country. It can be the past instead—the United States as it was before it was spoiled by immigrants and the enfranchisement of the blacks. This state of mind allows too many of us to lie and cheat and steal from the rest of us, to sell us junk and addictive poisons and corrupting entertainments. What are the rest of us, after all, but sub-human aborigines?