Shocking writing is like murder: the questions the jury must decide are the questions of motive and intent.
Any husband who loses interest in the drama of family life, as it unfolds, isn’t worth his salt.
Your whole duty as a writer is to please and satisfy yourself, and the true writer always plays to an audience of one. Start sniffing the air, or glancing at the Trend Machine, and you are as good as dead, although you may make a nice living.
Everything gets taken over by big business, I don’t care what line you’re in.
The value of the liberal in the republic is not that he is logical but that he is inquisitive.
As for business, we agree that it is a hard, cold-blooded game. Survival of the fittest. Dog eat dog. The fact that about eighty-five per cent of the dogs have recently been eaten by the other dogs perhaps explains what long ago we noticed about business: that it had a strong smell of boloney. If dog continues to eat dog, there will be only one dog left, and he will be sick to his stomach.
All writing slants the way a writer leans, and no man is born perpendicular, although many men are born upright.
I can still feel my old Ford nuzzling me at the curb, as though looking for an apple in my pocket.
Every day was a happy day, and every night was peaceful.
When I am composed I feel no need of affiliating myself with anybody. There is a lot of the cat in me, and cats are not joiners.
All writing is communication; creative writing is communication through revelation – it is the Self escaping into the open.
One morning when the wind was blowing from the West, Stuart put on his sailor suit and his sailor hat, took his spyglass down from the shelf, and set out for a walk, full of the joy of life and the fear of dogs.
With the right words, you can change the world.
One nation’s common sense is another nation’s high blood pressure.
Some day people will put faith in poets, who saw things centuries ago in perfect clarity.
Some of the best writings of writers, it seems to us, were done before they actually thought of themselves as engaged in producing literature. Some of the best humor of humorists was produced before ever they heard the distant laughter of their multitudes.
A distinguishing political feature of America is that it has never had a voice; it has had a lot of hoopdedoo but no voice, and that’s the way we like it.
In the country there are a few chances of sudden rejuvenation–a shift in weather, perhaps, or something arriving in the mail. But in New York the chances are endless.
Omit needless words! Omit needless words! Omit needless words!
In almost everyone’s life there is one event that changes the whole course of his existence.
So complete is each neighborhood, and so strong the sense of neighborhood, that many a New Yorker spends a lifetime within the confines of an area smaller than a country village. Let him walk two blocks from his corner and he is in a strange land and will feel uneasy till he gets back.