On the whole, with scandalous exceptions, Democracy has given the ordinary worker more dignity than he ever had.

She did her work with the thoroughness of a mind which reveres details and never quite understands them.

Every compulsion is put upon writers to become safe, polite, obedient, and sterile. In protest, I declined election to the National Institute of Arts and Letters some years ago, and now I must decline the Pulitzer Prize.

To a true-blue professor of literature in an American university, literature is not something that a plain human being, living today, painfully sits down to produce. No; it is something dead.

When audiences come to see us authors lecture, it is largely in the hope that we'll be funnier to look at than to read.

That nation is proudest and noblest and most exalted which has the greatest number of really great men.

On the whole, with scandalous exceptions, Democracy has given the ordinary worker more dignity than he ever had.