There is no logical reason why the camel of great art should pass through the needle of mob intelligence.

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.

Any authentic work of art must start an argument between the artist and his audience.

I had a glorious father, I had no father at all.

It isn't only living people who die, it is great stretches of living, which can die even when the people who lived there still exist.

Were I to go down into the market-place, armed with the powers of witchcraft, and take a peasant by the shoulders and whisper to him, 'In your lifetime, have you known peace?' wait for his answer, shake his shoulders and transform him into his father, and ask him the same question, and transform him in his turn to his father, I would never hear the word 'Yes,' if I carried my questioning of the dead back for a thousand years. I would always hear, 'No, there was fear, there were our enemies without, our rulers within, there was prison, there was torture, there was violent death.

No great thing happens suddenly.