No country has suffered so much from the ruins of war while being at peace as the American.

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.

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

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.

Ignorance breeds fear; the more you learn about your subject, the less fear it holds for you.

Bad music is the attempt to imitate something that has very strong rules and grammar.

If we took as much pains to be what we ought, as we do to deceive others by disguising what we are; we might appear as we are, without being at the trouble of any disguise.

Your soul will be dead even before your body: fear nothing further.

Is love a fancy, or a feeling?

Enemies are created, not born.

The Good Lord made all the integers; the rest is man's doing.

I still do have the little lunch bag that my mother made out of a towel and embroidered with my name on it for when I went to kindergarten.

I am the greatest tennis player. The other players are like coins in my pocket that I give to a homeless man.

Oh, my only – if I had one frustration in being on “West Wing” is I wasn’t on it enough, because I was in and out.