You don't write because you want to say something. You write because you have something to say.
In a real dark night of the soul, it is always three o'clock in the morning, day after day.
Happiness, remarked Maury Noble one day, is only the first hour after the alleviation of some especially intense misery.
A fellow has to believe in something, Jay-such as the rottenness of humanity.
Often people display a curious respect for a man drunk, rather like the respect of simple races for the insane... There is something awe-inspiring in one who has lost all inhibitions.
I like people and I like them to like me, but I wear my heart where God put it, on the inside.
Advertising is a racket, like the movies and the brokerage business. You cannot be honest without admitting that its constructive contribution to humanity is exactly minus zero.
The exhilarating ripple of her voice was a wild tonic in the rain.
Life is much more successfully looked at from a single window.
I like France, where everybody thinks he's Napoleon--down here everybody thinks he's Christ.
I hate dainty minds,' answered Marjorie. 'But a girl has to be dainty in person. If she looks like a million dollars she can talk about Russia, ping-pong, or the League of Nations and get away with it...
He's sensitive and I don't want him to break his heart over somebody who doesn't care about him.
And for a moment I thought I loved her. But I am slow-thinking and full of interior rules that act as brakes on my desires
Understand now, I'm purely a fiction writer and do not profess to be an earnest student of political science, but I believe strongly that such a law as one prohibiting liquor is foolish, and all the w...
Either you think, or else others have to think for you and take power from you, pervert and discipline your natural tastes, civilize and sterilize you.
So we drove on toward death through the cooling twilight.
People over forty can seldom be permanently convinced of anything. At eighteen our convictions are hills from which we look; at forty-five they are caves in which we hide.
Lie to me by the moonlight. Do a fabulous story.
It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And then one fine morning—So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into...
A phrase began to beat in my ears with a sort of heady excitement: There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired.