From what I have seen, I am driven to the conclusion that religion is only good for good people.

The comic element is the incorrigible element in every human being; the capacity to learn, from experience or instruction, is what is forbidden to all comic creations and to what is comic in you and me.

The suspense in a novel is not only in the reader, but in the novelist himself, who is intensely curious too about what will happen to the hero.

We are a nation of 20 million bathrooms, with a humanist in every tub.

What's the use of falling in love if you both remain inertly as you were?

To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.

For both writer and reader, the novel is a lonely, physically inactive affair. Only the imagination races.