“To write is a humiliation.”
“Every decision you make is a mistake.”
“A strong foe is better than a weak friend.”
“What most men desire is a virgin who is a whore.”
“Genius, like truth, has a shabby and neglected mien.”
“Man hoards himself when he has nothing to give away.”
“Nothing in our times has become so unattractive as virtue.”
“Writing is conscience, scruple, and the farming of our ancestors.”
“I would rather take hellebore than spend a conversation with a good, little man.”
“When one realizes that his life is worthless he either commits suicide or travels.”
“One cat in a house is a sign of loneliness, two of barrenness, and three of sodomy.”
“No country has suffered so much from the ruins of war while being at peace as the American.”
“We cannot live, suffer or die for somebody else, for suffering is too precious to be shared.”
“There is hardly a man on earth who will take advice unless he is certain that it is positively bad.”
“We are a most solitary people, and we live, repelled by one another, in the gray, outcast cities of Cain.”
“Everything ultimately fails, for we die, and that is either the penultimate failure or our most enigmatical achievement.”
“Ambition is a Dead Sea fruit, and the greatest peril to the soul is that one is likely to get precisely what he is seeking.”
“Utility is our national shibboleth: the savior of the American businessman is fact and his uterine half-brother, statistics.”
“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.”
“Those who write for lucre or fame are grosser than the cartel robbers, for they steal the genius of the people, which is its will to resist evil.”
“We can only write well about our sins because it is too difficult to recall a virtuous act or even whether it was the result of good or evil motives.”
“The machine has had a pernicious effect upon virtue, pity, and love, and young men used to machines which induce inertia, and fear, are near impotent.”
“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.”
“Always like to look on the optimistic side of life, but I am realistic enough to know that life is a complex matter. Walt Disney Every decision you make is a mistake.”
“We are always talking about being together, and yet whatever we invent destroys the family, and makes us wild, touchless beasts feeding on technicolor prairies and rivers.”
“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.”
“Intellectual sodomy, which comes from the refusal to be simple about plain matters, is as gross and abundant today as sexual perversion and they are nowise different from one another.”
“Men are mad most of their lives; few live sane, fewer die so. The acts of people are baffling unless we realize that their wits are disordered. Man is driven to justice by his lunacy.”
“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.”
“One of the weaknesses in the cooperative is that it has never been sufficiently leavened by the imagination. This is a quick-silver faculty, and likely to be a cause of worry to any collective settlement.”