We are neurotically haunted today by the imminence, and by the ignominy, of failure. We know at how frightening a cost one succeeds: to fail is something too awful to think about.

Prig and philistine, Ph.D. and C.P.A., despot of English 218c and big shot of the Kiwanis Club-how much, at bottom, they both hate Art, and how hard it is to know which of them hates it the more.

The moving van is a symbol of more than our restlessness, it is the most conclusive evidence possible of our progress.

Ours is not so much an age of vulgarity as of vulgarization; everything is tampered with or touched up, or adulterated or watered down, in an effort to make it palatable, in an effort to make it pay.

For tens of millions of people [television] has become habit-forming, brain-softening, taste-degrading.

Nothing so soothes our vanity as a display of greater vanity in others; it makes us vain, in fact, of our modesty.

The test of interesting people is that subject matter doesn't matter.