The artist is always beginning. Any work of art which is not a beginning, an invention, a discovery is of little worth.
Nothing written for pay is worth printing. Only what has been written against the market.
The what is so much more important than how.
Pay no attention to the criticism of men who have never themselves written a notable work.
What matters most is not the idea, but the capacity to believe in it completely.
It would be about as easy for an American to become a Chinaman or a Hindoo as for him to acquire an Englishness or a Frenchness or a European-ness that is more than half skin deep.
Liberty is not a right but a duty.
Why fight for a flag when you can buy one for a nickel.
Every great change is simple.
Use no superfluous word, no adjective, which does not reveal something.
In our time, the curse is monetary illiteracy, just as inability to read plain print was the curse of earlier centuries.
If a nation's literature declines, the nation atrophies and decays.
The concept of genius as akin to madness has been carefully cultivated by the inferiority complex of the public.
Man is an over-complicated organism. If he is doomed to extinction he will die out for want of simplicity.
All my life I believed I knew something. But then one strange day came when I realized that I knew nothing, yes, I knew nothing. And so words became void of meaning. I have arrived too late at ultimate uncertainty.
The only chance for victory over the brainwash is the right of every man to have his ideas judged one at a time. You never get clarity as long as you have these packaged words, as long as a word is used by twenty-five people in twenty-five different ways. That seems to me to be the first fight, if there is going to be any intellect left.
When two men in business always agree, one of them is unnecessary.
The sum of human wisdom is not contained in any one language.
The curse of me and my nation is that we always think things can be bettered by immediate action of some sort, any sort rather than no sort.
Be not cheap or mediocre in desiring.
Don't be blinded by the theorists and a lying press.
Poetry is a language pared down to its essentials.
Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.
Rhythm is form cut into time.
Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear.
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