We are not forced into unpleasant activities. We either allow them to come about or we encourage them to come about.
Seek goodness everywhere, and when it is found, bring it out of its hiding place and let it be free and unashamed.
The bicycle is the noblest invention of mankind.
Live, for this is the time of your life.
Genius is play, and man’s capacity for achieving genius is infinite, and many may achieve genius only through play.
Of course if you like your kids, if you love them from the moment they begin, you yourself begin all over again, in them, with them, and so there is something more to the world again.
Each book can make a life or a fragment of it more beautiful.
People is all everything is, all it has ever been, all it can ever be.
What a lonely and silly thing it is to be an Armenian writer in America.
I can’t hate for long. It isn’t worth it.
I don’t have a name and I don’t have a plot. I have the typewriter and I have white paper and I have me, and that should add up to a novel.
Of all the things I love to taste, sweetest is the kiss of love.
It takes a lot of rehearsing for a man to be himself.
Christmas is sights, especially the sights of Christmas reflected in the eyes of a child.
San Francisco itself is art, above all literary art. Every block is a short story, every hill a novel. Every home a poem, every dweller within immortal. That is the whole truth.
I took to writing at an early age to escape from meaninglessness, uselessness, unimportance, insignificance, poverty, enslavement, ill health, despair, madness, and all manner of other unattractive, natural and inevitable things.
If you’re alive, you can’t be bored in San Francisco. If you’re not alive, San Francisco will bring you to life.
Every man in the world is better than someone else and not as good someone else.
Every man is correct in asking God why he is stuck with himself, and his rotten luck.
Yes, the idiot is indeed the good man, but only because he doesn’t know any better.