There are times when every act, no matter how private and unconscious, becomes political.

People have been modeling their lives after films for years, but the medium is somehow unsuited to moral lessons, cautionary tales or polemics of any kind.

Idle people are often bored and bored people, unless they sleep a lot, are cruel. It is not accident that boredom and cruelty are great preoccupations in our time.

Bored people, unless they sleep a lot, are cruel.

Lyda was an exuberant, even a dramatic gardener.... She was always holding up a lettuce or a bunch of radishes with an air of resolute courage, as though she had shot them herself.

Fear . . . is forward. No one is afraid of yesterday.

There follows a little obscenity here, a dash of philosophy there, considerable whining overall, and a modern satirical novel is born.

My dislike has no consequences. It accrues only in my mind—like preserves on a shelf or guns zeroing in, and never firing.

No one ever confides a secret to one person only. No one destroys all copies of a document.

My capacity for having a good time exists. It surfaces, however, on odd occasions.

The whole magic of a plot requires that somebody be impeded from getting something over with.

Blues is like American Express. I don't leave home without it.

American literature has never been content to be just one among the many literatures of the Western World. It has always aspired to be the literature not only of a new continent but of a New World.

I'm fast for a middleweight - I have middleweight speed.

It was a saying of the ancients, "Truth lies in a well;" and to carry on this metaphor, we may justly say that logic does supply us with steps, whereby we may go down to reach the water.

Middle-earth is our world. I have (of course) placed the action in a purely imaginary (though not wholly impossible) period of antiquity, in which the shape of the continental masses was different.

That undefined and mingled hum, Voice of the desert never dumb!

Keep on complaining about slavery and that was over 40 to 50 years ago. You know, black folks need to move on.

I'd like to think I'm going upriver in talking about world-view topics rather than particular political or controversial topics.

To a philosopher no circumstance, however trifling, is too minute.

Have the courage to follow your passion - and if you don't know what it is, realize that one reason for your existence on earth is to find it.