Everything Quotes

The faces of most American women over thirty are relief maps of petulant and bewildered unhappiness.

An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmaster of ever afterwards.

A big man has no time really to do anything but just sit and be big.

Though the Jazz Age continued it became less and less an affair of youth. The sequel was like a children's party taken over by the elders.

After all, life hasn't much to offer except youth, and I suppose for older people, the love of youth in others.

For awhile after you quit Keats all other poetry seems to be only whistling or humming.

Personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures.

Family quarrels are bitter things. They don't go according to any rules. They're not like aches or wounds, they're more like splits in the skin that won't heal because there's not enough material.

Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat.

The victor belongs to the spoils.

I've been drunk for about a week now, and I thought it might sober me up to sit in a library.

You don't write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say.

All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.

Everybody's youth is a dream, a form of chemical madness.

I like people and I like them to like me, but I wear my heart where God put it, on the inside.

I'm a romantic; a sentimental person thinks things will last, a romantic person hopes against hope that they won't.

There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired.

My idea is always to reach my generation. The wise writer writes for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterward.

His was a great sin who first invented consciousness. Let us lose it for a few hours.

Only remember west of the Mississippi it's a little more look, see, act. A little less rationalize, comment, talk.

Every one suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues.

Genius goes around the world in its youth incessantly apologizing for having large feet. What wonder that later in life it should be inclined to raise those feet too swiftly to fools and bores.

Scratch a Yale man with both hands and you'll be lucky to find a coast-guard. Usually you find nothing at all.

When people are taken out of their depths they lose their heads, no matter how charming a bluff they may put up.

No decent career was ever founded on a public.

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.

First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you.

Genius is the ability to put into effect what is on your mind.

Life is essentially a cheat and its conditions are those of defeat; the redeeming things are not happiness and pleasure but the deeper satisfactions that come out of struggle.

Show me a hero and I'll write you a tragedy.

There are no second acts in American lives.

No grand idea was ever born in a conference, but a lot of foolish ideas have died there.

Cut out all these exclamation points. An exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke.

Trouble has no necessary connection with discouragement. Discouragement has a germ of its own, as different from trouble as arthritis is different from a stiff joint.

To write it, it took three months; to conceive it three minutes; to collect the data in it all my life.

Riches have never fascinated me, unless combined with the greatest charm or distinction.

The easiest way to get a reputation is to go outside the fold, shout around for a few years as a violent atheist or a dangerous radical, and then crawl back to the shelter.

A great social success is a pretty girl who plays her cards as carefully as if she were plain.

Forgotten is forgiven.

It is in the thirties that we want friends. In the forties we know they won't save us any more than love did.

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.

The compensation of a very early success is a conviction that life is a romantic matter. In the best sense one stays young.

The idea that to make a man work you've got to hold gold in front of his eyes is a growth, not an axiom. We've done that for so long that we've forgotten there's any other way.

Nothing is as obnoxious as other people's luck.

Speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again.

Her body calculated to a millimeter to suggest a bud yet guarantee a flower.

A revolution is a struggle to the death between the future and the past.

Homeland or death! Socialism or death! We shall overcome!

The revolution is a dictatorship of the exploited against the exploiters.

Something must be done to save humanity! A better world is possible!