It is the writer's privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart.

Most men are a little better than their circumstances give them a chance to be.

No one is without Christianity, if we agree on what we mean by that word. It is every individual's individual code of behavior by means of which he makes himself a better human being than his nature wants to be, if he followed his nature only. Whatever its symbol - cross or crescent or whatever - that symbol is man's reminder of his duty inside the human race.

The only environment the artist needs is whatever peace, whatever solitude, and whatever pleasure he can get at not too high a cost.

It has always seemed to me that the only painless death must be that which takes the intelligence by violent surprise and from the rear so to speak since if death be anything at all beyond a brief and peculiar emotional state of the bereaved it must be a brief and likewise peculiar state of the subject as well and if aught can be more painful to any intelligence above that of a child or an idiot than a slow and gradual confronting with that which over a long period of bewilderment and dread it has been taught to regard as an irrevocable and unplumbable finality, I do not know it.

In writing, you must kill all your darlings.

You should approach Joyce's Ulysses as the illiterate Baptist preacher approaches the Old Testament: with faith.