Many writers who choose to be active in the world lose not virtue but time, and that stillness without which literature cannot be made.
What other culture could have produced someone like Hemmingway and not seen the joke?
We're not a democracy.
We must declare ourselves, become known; allow the world to discover this subterranean life of ours which connects kings and farm boys, artists and clerks. Let them see that the important thing is not the object of love, but the emotion itself.
Until the rise of American advertising, it never occurred to anyone anywhere in the world that the teenager was a captive in a hostile world of adults.
Today's public figures can no longer write their own speeches or books, and there is some evidence that they can't read them either.
To a man, ornithologists are tall, slender, and bearded so that they can stand motionless for hours, imitating kindly trees, as they watch for birds.
Think of the earth as a living organism that is being attacked by billions of bacteria whose numbers double every forty years. Either the host dies, or the virus dies, or both die.
There's a lot to be said for being nouveau riche, and the Reagans mean to say it all.
There is no such thing as a homosexual or a heterosexual person. There are only homo- or heterosexual acts. Most people are a mixture of impulses if not practices.
That is sad until one recalls how many bad books the world may yet be spared because of the busyness of writers.
Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies.
There is no human problem which could not be solved if people would simply do as I advise.
Television is now so desperately hungry for material that they're scraping the top of the barrel.
That loyal retainer of the Chase Manhattan Bank, the American president.