To believe yourself brave is to be brave; it is the one only essential thing.

My kind of loyalty was loyalty to one's country, not to its institutions or its office-holders.

We write frankly and freely, but then we modify before we print.

Ours is the "land of the free"-nobody denies that-nobody challenges it. (Maybe it is because we won't let other people testify.)

I can't do no literary work for the rest of this year because I'm meditating another lawsuit and looking around for a defendant.

The partitions of the houses were so thin we could hear the women occupants of adjoining rooms changing their minds.

All publishers are Columbuses. The successful author is their America. The reflection that they-like Columbus-didn't discover what they expected to discover, and didn't discover what they started out to discover, doesn't trouble them. All they remember is that they discovered America; they forget that they started out to discover some patch or corner of India.