Language is one of the thin walls humanity has built up over centuries against its own bestial and destructive impulses.

Writers sometimes talk as though they were the only friends of civilization. This is their conceit. But they have special powers to serve -- or to corrupt -- civilization, and are obliged to use them.

Think of all the really successful men and women you know. Do you know a single one who didn't learn very young the trick of calling attention to himself in the right quarters?

the sex even in serious pornography has less singularity than the mating of squirrels.

As often as not our whole self...engages itself in the most trivial of things, the shape of a particular hill, a road in the town in which we lived as children, the movement of wind in grass. The things we shall take with us when we die will nearly all be small things.

I am persuaded that not a novel in ten thousand is of any use to a child to fit him for life. The most are of use only to unfit him -- to blunt his senses and infect him with the writers' poor silly sentiments. Nine out of ten novelists deserve to be prosecuted under an Adulterated Emotions Act.

Great advertising is the expression of deep emotional sincerity.