The writer cannot make the seas of distraction stand still, but he [or she] can at times come between the madly distracted and the distractions.

I am an American, Chicago born – Chicago, that somber city – and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent. But a man's character is his fate, says Heraclitus, and in the end there isn't any way to disguise the nature of the knocks by acoustical work on the door or gloving the knuckles.

Only self-hatred could lead him to ruin himself because his heart was "broken.

I am more stupid about some things than others; not equally stupid in all directions; I am not a well-rounded person.

If women are expected to do the same work as men, we must teach them the same things.

A good novel is worth more then the best scientific study.

As for types like my own, obscurely motivated by the conviction that our existence was worthless if we didn't make a turning point of it, we were assigned to the humanities, to poetry, philosophy, painting - the nursery games of humankind, which had to be left behind when the age of science began. The humanities would be called upon to choose a wallpaper for the crypt, as the end drew near.