War is more like a novel than it is like real life and that is its eternal fascination. It is a thing based on reality but invented, it is a dream made real, all the things that make a novel but not really life.
When in a museum, walk slowly but keep walking.
To complicate things in new ways, that is really very easy; but to see things in new ways, that is difficult and that is why genius is so rare.
A creator is so completely contemporary that he has the appearance of being ahead of his generation.
The family is always the family but during vacations it is an extended family and that is exhausting.
Since it could be done what was the use of doing it, and anyway you always have to stop doing something sometime.
To write is to write is to write is to write is to write is to write is to write is to write.
If you write a half hour a day it makes a lot of writing year by year.
More great Americans were failures than they were successes. They mostly spent their lives in not having a buyer for what they had for sale.
One of the things that I discovered in lecturing was that gradually one ceased to hear what one said one heard what the audience hears one say.
I don’t envisage collectivism. There is no such animal, it is always individualism, sometimes the rest vote and sometimes they do not, and if they do they do and if they do not they do not.
In the United States there is more space where nobody is than where anybody is. This is what makes American what it is.
Oh, I wish I were a miser; being a miser must be so occupying.
Writer or painter god-parents are notoriously unreliable. That is, there is certain before long to be a cooling of friendship.
Even the propagandists on the radio find it very difficult to really say let alone believe that the world will be a happy place, of love and peace and plenty, and that the lion will lie down with the lamb and everybody will believe anybody.
Suppose no one asked a question. What would the answer be?
A nice war is a war where everybody who is heroic is a hero, and everybody more or less is a hero in a nice war. Now this war is not at all a nice war.
A great deal of beauty is rapture. A circle is a necessity. Otherwise you would see no one. We each have our circle.
Nothing has happened today except kindness.
I like a thing simple but it must be simple through complication. Everything must come into your scheme, otherwise you cannot achieve real simplicity.