Nothing in our times has become so unattractive as virtue.

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.

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.

It takes a long time to understand nothing.

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.

Wherever comes man comes tragedy and comedy also.

I sit there thinking about how much courage it takes to live an ordinary life.

I think it's ridiculous. I'm very much opposed to sanctuary cities. They breed crime, there's a lot of problems. If we have to, we'll defund.

If you cannot - in the long run - tell everyone what you have been doing, your doing has been worthless.

Well you know I've attracted a lot of criticism by, for example, suggesting that child benefit should be taken away from higher rate taxpaying families.

I have so much music inside me I'm just trying to stay afloat.

In the same way that we need statesmen to spare us the abjection of exercising power, we need scholars to spare us the abjection of learning.

Secret guilt is by silence revealed.

Congress is a Mafia running a protection racket.. .

[ Negro leaders] never let the white man know exactly what black people are thinking.