Writing is both mask and unveiling.
I get up every morning determined to both change the world and to have one hell of a good time. Sometimes, this makes planning the day difficult.
No one can write decently who is distrustful of the reader's intelligence or whose attitude is patronizing.
A writer should concern himself with whatever absorbs his fancy, stirs his heart, and unlimbers his typewriter. ... A writer has the duty to be good, not lousy: true, not false; lively, not dull; accurate, not full of error. He should tend to lift people up, not lower them down.
The essayist is a self-liberated man, sustained by the childish belief that everything he thinks about, everything that happens to him, is of general interest.
Television hangs on the questionable theory that whatever happens anywhere should be sensed everywhere. If everyone is going to be able to see everything, in the long run all sights may lose whatever rarity value they once possessed, and it may well turn out that people, being able to see and hear practically everything, will be specially interested in almost nothing.
When an American family becomes separated from its toothbrushes and combs and pajamas for a few hours it considers that it has had quite an adventure.
Creation is in part merely the business of forgoing the great and small distractions.
Life's meaning has always eluded me and I guess always will. But I love it just the same.
I am still encouraged to go on. I wouldn't know where else to go.
Most people think of peace as a state of Nothing Bad Happening, or Nothing Much Happening. Yet if peace is to overtake us and make us the gift of serenity and well-being, it will have to be the state of Something Good Happening.
Never hurry and never worry!
Books are the door of escape from the forest.
The trouble with the profit system has always been that it was highly unprofitable to most people.
Everything in life is somewhere else, and you get there in a car.
When I get sick of what men do, I have only to walk a few steps in another direction to see what spiders do. Or what the weather does. This sustains me very well indeed.
An editor is a person who knows more about writing than writers do but who has escaped the terrible desire to write.
Liberals are like dogs: The liberal holds that he is true to the republic when he is true to himself. (It may not be as cozy an attitude as it sounds.) He greets with enthusiasm the fact of the journey, as a dog greets a man's invitation to take a walk. And he acts in the dog's way too, swinging wide, racing ahead, doubling back, covering many miles of territory that the man never traverses, all in the spirit of inquiry and the zest for truth. He leaves a crazy trail, but he ranges far beyond the genteel old party he walks with and he is usually in a better position to discover a skunk.
Sailors have an expression about the weather: they say the weather is a great bluffer. I guess the same is true of our human society — things can look dark, then a break shows in the clouds, and all is changed.
A poem compresses much in a small space and adds music, thus heightening its meaning.
Television will enormously enlarge the eye's range, and, like radio, will advertise the Elsewhere. Together with the tabs, the mags, and the movies, it will insist that we forget the primary and the near in favor of the secondary and the remote.
It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer.
Luck is not something you can mention in the presence of self-made men.
It is Sunday, mid-morning-Sunday in the living room, Sunday in the kitchen, Sunday in the woodshed, Sunday down the road in the village: I hear the bells, calling me to share God's grace.
A schoolchild should be taught grammar—for the same reason that a medical student should study anatomy.
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