A big man has no time really to do anything but just sit and be big.

A great social success is a pretty girl who plays her cards as carefully as if she were plain.

Action is character.

Advertising is a racket, like the movies and the brokerage business. You cannot be honest without admitting that its constructive contribution to humanity is exactly minus zero.

After all, life hasn’t much to offer except youth and I suppose for older people the love of youth in others.

All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.

America is a willingness of the heart.

An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterwards.

An idea ran back and forward in his head like a blind man, knocking over the solid furniture.

Any rich, unprogressive old party with that particularly grasping, acquisitive form of mentality known as financial genius can own a paper that is the intellectual meat and drink of thousands of tired, hurried men, men too involved in the business of modern living to swallow anything but predigested food. For two cents the voter buys his politics, prejudices, and philosophy. A year later there is a new political ring or a change in the paper’s ownership, consequence: more confusion, more contradiction, a sudden inrush of new ideas, their tempering, their distillation, the reaction against them.