Human beings are mercifully so constituted as to be able to conceal from themselves what they intend to do until they are well into the doing of it.

We think in youth that our bodies are identical to ourselves and have the same interests, but discover later in life that they are heartless companions who have been accidentally yoked with us, and who are as likely as not, in our extreme sickness or old age, to treat us with less mercy than we would have received at the hands of the worst bandits.

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

No one can write a best-seller by taking thought. The slightest touch of insincerity blurs its appeal. The writer who keeps his tongue in his cheek, who knows that he is writing for fools and that, therefore, he had better write like a fool, makes a respectable living out of serials and novelettes; but he will never make the vast, the blaring, half a million success. That comes of blended sincerity and vitality.

Economists are like Aeolian harps, and the sounds that issue from them are determined by the winds that blow.

Here lies the real terror in the international war of ideologies; that a city knows not whom it entertains.

Literature must be an analysis of experience and a synthesis of the findings into a unity.