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

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

Better the fragrant herb of wit and a little cream of affability than all the pretty cups in the world.

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

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.

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