Ninety per cent of life is a nightmare, do you think I am going to get it rounded up to hundred per cent?

The more realistic you are the more you threaten the grounds of your own art.

Here we write well when we expose frauds and hypocrites. We are great at counting warts and blemishes and weighting feet of clay. In expressing love, we belong among the underdeveloped countries.

O Lord! he concluded, forgive all these trespasses. Lead me not into Penn Station.

The best argument is an undeniably good book.

... a fellow can't predict what he will pick up in the form of influence.

I see that I've become a really bad correspondent. It's not that I don't think of you. You come into my thoughts often. But when you do it appears to me that I owe you a particularly grand letter. And so you end in the "warehouse of good intentions": "Can't do it now." "Then put it on hold." This is one's strategy for coping with old age, and with death--because one can't die with so many obligations in storage. Our clever species, so fertile and resourceful in denying its weaknesses.