If there is anything worse than the aching tedium of staring out of car windows, it is the irritation of getting tickets, packing, finding trains, lying in bouncing berths, washing without water, digging out passports, and fighting through customs. To live in Carlsbad is seemly and to loaf at San Remo healing to the soul, but to get from Carlsbad to San Remo is of the devil.

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.

It is impossible to discourage the real writers - they don't give a damn what you say, they're going to write.

Whatever the misery, he could not regain contentment with a world which, once doubted, became absurd.

Every compulsion is put upon writers to become safe, polite, obedient, and sterile.

Men die, but the plutocracy is immortal; and it is necessary that fresh generations should be trained to its service.

What are these unheard of sins you condemn so much - and like so well?