Talent alone is helpless today. Any success requires both talent and luck. And the ‘luck’ has to be helped along and provided by someone.
Those who say theory and practice are two unrelated realms are fools in one and scoundrels in the other.
If you tell an amateur that his story is not good, he always declares indignantly: ‘Oh, but it really happened just like this!’ The writer who doesn’t understand that this is beside the point is not a writer at all.
Do not set out to write with your eyes on the box office. It can’t be done.
Whenever anyone accuses some person of being ‘unfeeling,’ he means that that person is just.
Capitalism and altruism are incompatible; they are philosophical opposites; they cannot co-exist in the same man or in the same society.
This god, this one word: I.
Faith is the wors curse of mankind, as the exact antithesis and enemy of thought.
Whenever destroyers appear among men, they start by destroying money, for money is men’s protection, and the base of a moral existence.
There is no such dichotomy as ‘human rights’ versus ‘property rights.’ No human rights can exist without property rights.
I would give the greatest sunset in the world for one sight of New York’s skyline.
Ever since Kant divorced reason from reality, his intellectual descendants have been diligently widening the breach.
To achieve, you need thought.
I made my fortune by being able to spot a certain kind of man.
A good novel is an indivisible sum; every scene, sequence and passage of a good novel has to involve, contribute to and advance all three of its major attributes: theme, plot, characterization.
Ordinary human concern for human distress does not manifest itself ordinarily in the form of a gun aimed at the wallets and earnings of one’s neighbors.
When you have civilized men fighting savages, you support the civilized men, no matter who they are.
Romantic art is always stylized: the better the art, the cleaner and more attractive and intelligent the stylization.
The more neurotic and evasive a person is, the shorter the range of his interests.
A man of independent judgment is a man of profound self-esteem.