It takes a long time to understand nothing.

Herman Melville was as separated from a civilized literature as the lost Atlantis was said to have been from the great peoples of the earth.

We cannot live, suffer or die for somebody else, for suffering is too precious to be shared.

When one realizes that his life is worthless he either commits suicide or travels.

Nothing in our times has become so unattractive as virtue.

Recognize the cunning man not by the corpses he pays homage to but by the living writers he conspires against with the most shameful weapon, Silence, or the briefest review.

Writing is conscience, scruple, and the farming of our ancestors.

It is very perplexing how an intrepid frontier people, who fought a wilderness, floods, tornadoes, and the Rockies, cower before criticism, which is regarded as a malignant tumor in the imagination.

A strong foe is better than a weak friend.

Narcissus never wrote well nor was a friend.

There is a strange and mighty race of people called the Americans who are rapidly becoming the coldest in the world because of this cruel, man-eating idol, lucre.

Eating is an agricultural act.

Father to teenage son: "My relationship with you is more important than anything I've got to say to you.

From the perspective of meditation, every state is a special state, every moment a special moment.

All the inane, meaningless noises people make that pass for intelligent conversation. They might as well be pigs grunting in the pen. (92)

Probability and expectation are not the same. Its probability and probability times the pay off.

The mother's love for her child is very strong in Korean society - almost on the borderline of being an obsession.

Unless a variety of opinions are laid before us, we have no opportunity of selection, but are bound of necessity to adopt the particular view which may have been brought forward.

I work from a personal place, and the work has personal meaning for me.

In Hollywood, it's hard to be funny, because all the big jokes are in Washington.

I think that the ideals of youth are fine, clear and unencumbered; and that the real art of living consists in keeping alive the conscience and sense of values we had when we were young.