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

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

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

Magnanimous people have no vanity, they have no jealousy, and they feed on the true and the solid wherever they find it. And, what is more, they find it everywhere.

The writer is important only by dint of the territory he colonizes.

No man should ever publish a book until he has first read it to a woman.

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.