How smoothly one becomes, not a cheat, exactly, not really a liar, just a man who’ll say anything for pay.
Success in almost any field depends more on energy and drive than it does on intelligence. This explains why we have so many stupid leaders.
The definition of a beautiful woman is one who loves me.
It is impossible to treat a child too well. Children are spoiled by being ignored too much or by harshness, not by kindness.
Selfishness beats altruism within groups. Altruistic groups beat selfish groups. Everything else is commentary.
Only masochists can get along without editing their own memories.
I really don’t know what I was looking for when I got back from the war, but it seemed as though all I could see was a lot of bright young men in gray flannel suits rushing around New York in a frantic parade to nowhere. They seemed to me to be pursuing neither ideals nor happiness – they were pursuing a routine. For a long while I thought I was on the sidelines watching that parade, and it was quite a shock to glance down and see that I too was wearing a gray flannel suit.
I could get a job in an advertising agency. I’ll write copy telling people to eat more cornflakes and smoke more and more cigarettes and buy more refrigerators and automobiles, until they explode with happiness.
That had been the trouble with him and Betsy: what with his brooding about the past and worrying about the future, there had never been any present at all.
A man who wants time to read and write lets the grass grow long.
It doesn’t really matter. Here goes nothing. It will be interesting to see what happens.
Another statistical fact came to him then, a fact which he knew would be ridiculously melodramatic to put into an application for a job at the United Broadcasting Corporation, or to think about at all. He hadn’t thought about this for a long while. It wasn’t a thing he had deliberately tried to forget – he simply hadn’t thought about it for quite a few years. It was the unreal-sounding, probably irrelevant, but quite accurate fact that he had killed seventeen men.
A birth usually has more consequences than a death.
I only do what only I can do.
Art is the essential medium for the communication of a moral ideal.