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

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

What's wrong with this egotism? If a man doesn't delight in himself and the force in him and feel that he and it are wonders, how is all life to become important to him?

In youth there are always two forces fighting in people. The warm unthinking little animal struggles against the thing that reflects and remembers

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

Only the few know the sweetness of the twisted apples.

From being quite sure of himself and his future he becomes not at all sure. If he be an imaginative boy a door is torn open and for the first time he looks out upon the world, seeing, as though they marched in procession before him, the countless figures of men who before his time have come out of nothingness into the world, lived their lives and again disappeared into nothingness. The sadness of sophistication has come to the boy.