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.

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

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

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

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

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

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