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

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

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

The instructed man is ashamed to pronounce in an Orphic manner what everybody knows, and because he is silent people think he is making fun of them.

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.

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.