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

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.

It takes a long time to understand nothing.

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.

Tears are God's gift to us. Our holy water. They heal us as they flow.

You don't have to climb ladders to reach God. He dances within all He creates.

Hunger justifies the middle classes.

A desire to be in charge of our own lives, a need for control, is born in each of us. It is essential to our mental health, and our success, that we take control.

If there were no world, no time, no space, no condition, if none of us existed, that would be meditation.

Perhaps if England and Scotland together had one team we could at least beat the Germans.

How many things have been denied one day, only to become realities the next!

The right decision is the wrong decision if it's made too late.

My council to Ted [Turner] is that he should watch Fox Business. He'll be elated to find how much substance there is in our news.

I don't know anyone who actually likes the dark or night-time. I don't care how much they say it doesn't bother them. That's why we used to huddle in caves and light fires when the sun went down.