Once you have a point of view all history will back you up.

Never forget that it is we New Yorkers and New Englanders who have the monopoly of whatever oxygen there is in the American continent.

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

People of small calibre are always carping. How affected so-and-so is! Don't you think he is silly? He was certainly quite mistaken about this or that. They are bent on showing their own superiority, their knowledge or their prowess or good breeding.

No one is fit to judge a book until he has rounded Cape Horn in a sailing vessel, until he has bumped into two or three icebergs, until he has been lost in the sands of the desert, until he has spent a few years in the House of the Dead.

Those of our writers who have possessed a vivid personal talent have been paralyzed by a want of social background.

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.