The writer - more especially the novelist - who has not, at one moment or another, considered his publisher unworthy of him, has still to be conceived.

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

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

In what touches their social convictions, most persons do not think. The threat of change, with all it suggests to them in the loss of social and economic privilege, alarms so deeply that they are incapable of unprejudiced thought. They seem to themselves to be thinking, with lucidity and fairness, but since they start from the conviction that change must undoubtedly be for the worse or from settled grief at the thought of losing what is old and lovely, they are doing no more than following a logical sequence of ideas from a false premise.

A politician is forced to make a habit of noble phrases and optimistic lies. In the end they infect himself.

The least stupid question a man asks in his lifetime is not: Is there a God and is He a god or a devil? But: Brother, why are you killing me?

Only one person in a thousand knows the trick of really living in the present.