Sex is a slotmachine.

Individuality is freedom lived.

U.S.A. is the speech of the people

Curiosity urges you on-driving force.

This ain't a war... It's a goddam whorehouse.

Women alone always order sole. It means something.

The world's becoming a museum of socialist failures.

Accidents will happen in the best regulated families.

I never see the dawn that I don't say to myself perhaps.

Git an eyeful of cesspool alley the land of opportunity.

People do not choose a career; the career envelopes them.

People don't choose their careers; they are engulfed by them.

Letters are largely written to get things out of your system.

Anything that happens to you has some bearing upon what you write.

Democracy evolves where freedom is able to determine its own policy.

A man's got to work for more than himself and his kids to feel right

Mealtime's the only time I get to devote to the things of the spirit.

I've always thought you should concentrate on paddling your own canoe.

It's almost worth having been in the army for the joy your freedom gives you

It's almost worth having been in the army for the joy your freedom gives you.

We work to eat to get the strength to work to eat to get the strength to work.

A man is never more his single separate self than when he sets out on a journey.

Marxism has not only failed to promote human freedom, it has failed to produce food.

What's the use, there never was a woman living who could understand political ideas.

Life is to be used, not just held in the hand like a box of bonbons that nobody eats.

Walt Whitman's a hell of a lot more revolutionary than any Russian poet I've ever heard of.

Women is fine once you got em pinned down, boss, but when they ain't pinned down they're hell.

It's easy to forget how central the French people are in everything we mean when we say Europe.

Display advertising and the movies, though they may dull the wits, certainly stimulate the eyes.

If there is a special Hell for writers it would be in the forced contemplation of their own works.

If there is a special Hades for writers is would be in the forced contemplation of their own works.

Great works of the imagination are not produced quickly nor do they take quick effect on the popular mind.

The terrible thing about having New York go stale on you is that there's nowhere else. It's the top of the world.

A writer ... whittles at the words and phrases of today and makes of them forms to set the mind of tomorrow's generation.

War is utter damn nonsense, a vast cancer fed by lies and self seeking malignity on the part of those who don't do the fighting.

I do a lot of revising. Certain chapters six or seven times. Occasionally you can hit it right the first time. More often, you don't.

It's rather grisly, isnt it, how soon a living man becomes nothing more than a collection of stocks and bonds and debts and real estate?

But what's the good of freedom? What can you do with it? What one wants is to live well and have a beautiful house and be respected by people.

Shakespeare wouldn't have been any good if he'd stayed in Stratford. He had to go to London to be bathed in the full current of the Renaissance.

Love is cheap. You can buy it anywhere. Lives are cheap. It's money that's dear. You have to work days and sit up nights thinking how to make money.

There is a part of me in every character, naturally. That's why novelists rarely write good autobiographies. You start one and it becomes another novel.

In the last twenty-five years a change has come over the visual habits of Americans . . . From being a wordminded people we are becoming an eyeminded people.

The only way to find out anything about what kinds of lives people led in any given period is to tunnel into their records and to let them speak for themselves

When I was a kid I used to tell myself the moon was a silver gong and if I could climb high enough to beat on it with both hands all my wishes would come true.

The creation of a world view is the work of a generation rather than of an individual, but we each of us, for better or for worse, add our brick to the edifice.

The only way to find out anything about what kinds of lives people led in any given period is to tunnel into their records and to let them speak for themselves.

Breaking with old friends is one of the most painful of the changes in all that piling up of a multitude of small distasteful changes that constitutes growing older.

The mind cannot support moral chaos for long. Men are under as strong a compulsion to invent an ethical setting for their behavior as spiders are to weave themselves webs

The mind cannot support moral chaos for long. Men are under as strong a compulsion to invent an ethical setting for their behavior as spiders are to weave themselves webs.

If I were sufficiently romantic I suppose I'd have killed myself long ago just to make people talk about me. I haven't even got the conviction to make a successful drunkard.

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