Good Lord, I don't know what 'rights' a man has! And I don't know the solution of boredom. If I did, I'd be the one philosopher that had the cure for living. But I do know that about ten times as many people find their lives dull, and unnecessarily dull, as ever admit it; and I do believe that if we busted out and admitted it sometimes, instead of being nice and patient and loyal for sixty years, and then nice and patient and dead for the rest of eternity, why, maybe, possibly, we might make life more fun.

Fascism will come to America wrapped in a flag.

Why is it that traveling Americans are always so dreadful?

Do you think it's so snobbish, to want to see something besides one's fellow citizens abroad?

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

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

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.