You can make a killing as a playwright in America, but you can't make a living.

The object of art is not to make salable pictures. It is to save yourself.

The machines men are so intent on making have carried them very far from the old sweet things.

Many people must live and die alone, even in Winesburg.

Realism, in so far as the word means reality to life, is always bad art.

The writing of words can lead to all sorts of absurdities.

From the place by the railing at the edge of the tracks on the summer evening I return across the city to my own room. I am vividly aware of my own life that escaped the winter on the boat. How many such lives I have lived. Then I only made a dollar and a half a day and now I sometimes make more than that in a few minutes. How wonderful to be able to write words. ... Again I begin the endless game of reconstructing my own life, jerking it out of the shell that dies, striving to breathe into it beauty and meaning. ... I wonder why my life, why all lives, are not more beautiful.