Women know the damnation of charity because the habit of civilization has always been to throw them cheap alms rather than give them good wages.

Babbitt as a book was planless; its end arrived apparently because its author had come to the end of the writing-pad, or rather, one might suspect from its length, to the end of all writing-pads then on the market.

An audience proves its discipline by its capacity for stillness. Those who have never practiced continuous application to an exacting process cannot settle down to simple watching; they must chew gum, they must dig the peel off their oranges, they must shift from foot to foot, from buttock to buttock.

There is, of course, no reason for the existence of the male sex except that one sometimes needs help with moving the piano.

I had come to Yugoslavia to see what history meant in flesh and blood.

There was a definite process by which one made people into friends, and it involved talking to them and listening to them for hours at a time.

It appears that even the different parts of the same person do not converse among themselves, do not succeed in learning from each other what are their desires and their intentions.