The H-bomb rather favors small nations that doesn’t as yet possess it; they feel slightly more free to jostle other nations, having discovered that a country can stick its tongue out quite far these days without provoking war, so horrible are war’s consequences.
Much of our adult morality, in books and out of them, has a stuffiness unworthy of childhood. Our grown-up conclusions often rest on perilously soft bottom.
Liberty is never out of bounds or off limits; it spreads wherever it can capture the imagination of men.
I seldom went to bed before two or three o’clock in the morning, on the theory that if anything of interest were to happen to a young man it would almost certainly happen late at night.
There is another sort of day which needs celebrating in song – the day of days when spring at last holds up her face to be kissed, deliberate and unabashed. On that day no wind blows either in the hills or in the mind.
Sometimes a writer, like an acrobat, must try a trick that is too much for him.
The young writer should learn to spot them: words that at first glance seem freighted with delicious meaning, but that soon burst in the air, leaving nothing but a memory of bright sound.
A single overstatement, wherever or however it occurs, diminishes the whole, and a carefree superlative has the power to destroy, for the reader, the object of the writer’s enthusiasm.
Too many things on my mind, said Wilbur. Well, said the goose, that’s not my trouble. I have nothing at all on my mind, but I’ve too many things under my behind.
The rat had no morals, no conscience, no scruples, no consideration, no decency, no milk of rodent kindness, no compunctions, no higher feeling, no friendliness, no anything.
This is what youth must figure out: Girls, love, and living. The having, the not having, The spending and giving, And the meloncholy time of not knowing. This is what age must learn about: The ABC of dying. The going, yet not going, The loving and leaving, And the unbearable knowing and knowing.
Humour plays close to the big, hot fire, which is the truth, and the reader feels the heat.
Even now; with a thousand little voyages notched in my belt. I still feel a memorial chill on casting off.
The time not to become a father is eighteen years before a war.
A writer is like a bean plant – he has his little day, and then gets stringy.
The world organization debates disarmament in one room and, in the next room, moves the knights and pawns that make national arms imperative.
The critic leaves at curtain fall To find, in starting to review it, He scarcely saw the play at all For starting to review it.
As in the sexual experience, there are never more than two persons present in the act of reading-the writer, who is the impregnator, and the reader, who is the resspondent. This gives the experience of reading a sublimity and power unequalled by any other form of communication.
Anyone who writes down to children is simply wasting his time. You have to write up, not down.
Books are the door of escape from the forest.