No one in this country has any root anywhere; we don't live in America, we board here, we are like spiders that run over the surface of the water.

The creative impulses of man are always at war with the possessive impulses.

As against having beautiful workshops, studies, etc., one writes best in a cellar on a rainy day.

The American mind, unlike the English, is not formed by books, but, as Carl Sandburg once said to me, by newspapers and the Bible.

Longfellow is to poetry what the barrel-organ is to music.

Nothing is so soothing to our self-esteem as to find our bad traits in our forebears. It seems to absolve us.

Genius and virtue are to be more often found clothed in gray than in peacock bright.