But there comes a time in everybody's life when he must decide whether he'll live among human beings or nota fool among fools or a fool alone.

How do you know what the world is like? Do you know the world is a foul sty? Do you know if you rip the fronts off houses you'd find swine? The world's a hell. What does it matter what happens in it?

On Friday noon, July the twentieth, 1714, the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travelers into the gulf below.

There is one regard in which bullies show real perception when compared with their victims; it is their silent good-natured pleasure of the moment.

Every writer is necessarily a critic - that is, each sentence is a skeleton accompanied by enormous activity of rejection; and each selection is governed by general principles concerning truth, force, beauty, and so on. The critic that is in every fabulist is like the iceberg - nine-tenths of him is under water.

I would love to be the poet laureate of Coney Island.

Every good thing in the world stands on the razor-edge of danger.