The middle class, that prisoner of the barbarian 20th century.

You have more people that love you than you know.

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.

Most troubles are unnecessary. We have Nature beaten; we can make her grow wheat; we can keep warm when she sends blizzards. So we raise the devil just for pleasure--wars, politics, race-hatreds, labor-disputes.

Writers have a rare power not given to anyone else: we can bore people long after we are dead.

You're so earnest about morality that I hate to think how essentially immoral you must be underneath.

Don't be a writer. Writing is an escape from something. You be a scientist.