Shocking writing is like murder: the questions the jury must decide are the questions of motive and intent.
I’ve got a new friend, all right. But what a gamble friendship is! Charlotte is fierce, brutal, scheming, bloodthirsty – everything I don’t like. How can I learn to like her, even though she is pretty and, of course, clever?
When an American family becomes separated from its toothbrushes and combs and pajamas for a few hours it considers that it has had quite an adventure.
I would really rather feel bad in Maine than feel good anywhere else.
New York is to the nation what the white church spire is to the village – the visible symbol of aspiration and faith, the white plume saying the way is up!
Life is like writing with a pen. You can cross out your past but you can’t erase it.
Just to live in the country is a full-time job. You don’t have to do anything. The idle pursuit of making a living is pushed to one side, where it belongs, in favor of living itself, a task of such immediacy, variety, beauty, and excitement that one is powerless to resist its wild embrace.
The so-called science of poll-taking is not a science at all but mere necromancy. People are unpredictable by nature, and although you can take a nation’s pulse, you can’t be sure that the nation hasn’t just run up a flight of stairs.
It is by all odds the loftiest of cities. It even managed to reach the highest point in the sky at the lowest moment of the depression.
Children almost always hang onto things tighter than their parents think they will.
You have been my friends. That in itself is a tremendous thing.
It isn’t silence you can cut with a knife any more, it’s interchange of ideas. Intelligent discussion of practically everything is what is breaking up modern marriage.
Home was quite a place when people stayed there.
I have occasionally had the exquisite thrill of putting my finger on a little capsule of truth, and heard it give the faint squeak of mortality under my pressure.
Our vegetable garden is coming along well, with radishes and beans up, and we are less worried about revolution that we used to be.
We stand or fall by television.
I have no warm up exercises, other than to take an occasional drink.
I have a spaniel that defrocked a nun last week. He took hold of the cord. I had hold of the leash. It was like elephants holding tails. Imagine me undressing a nun, even second hand.
I don’t understand it, and I don’t like what I don’t understand.
In a free country it is the duty of writers to pay no attention to duty. Only under a dictatorship is literature expected to exhibit an harmonious design or an inspirational tone.