- So that's a Broadway show. For God's sake, I could write a better one than that in twenty-four hours! [to Random House publisher Bennett Cerf, after being taken to his first Broadway play, "Ceiling Zero"]
- Genius is play, and man's capacity for achieving genius is infinite, and many may achieve genius only through play.
- There is little pride in writers. They know they are human and shall some day die and be forgotten. Knowing all this a writer is gentle and kindly where another man is severe and unkind.
- I was a little afraid of him; not the boy himself, but of what he seemed to be: the victim of the world.
- Indians are born with an instinct for riding, rowing, hunting, fishing, and swimming. Americans are born with an instinct for fooling around with machines.
- All I can do is write my stories for mankind, and rest easy.
- The people you hate, well, this is the question about such people: why do you hate them?
- What the hell are they all looking for? A way out. A way to the right way out. A way to leave. A way to go. A way to have had it, to have had enough of it, to be done with it. A decent way to give it all over to the giver of it all.
- Every man alive in the world is a beggar of one sort or another, every last one of them, great and small. The priest begs God for grace, and the king begs something for something. Sometimes he begs the people for loyalty, sometimes he begs God to forgive him. No man in the world can have endured ten years without having begged God to forgive him.
- I don't like to see kids throw away their truth just because it isn't worth a dime in the open market.
- One day in the afternoon of the world, glum death will come and sit in you, and when you get up to walk, you will be as glum as death, but if you're lucky, this will only make the fun better and the love greater.
- If you can't write a decent short story because of the cold, write something else. Write anything. Write a long letter to somebody.
- I care so much about everything that I care about nothing.
- I don't think my writing is sentimental, although it is a very sentimental thing to be a human being.
- Everybody has to die, but I always believed an exception would be made in my case. Now what?
- I have a faint idea what it is like to be alive.
- I am deeply opposed to violence in all its forms, and yet I myself am violent in spirit, in my quarrel with the unbeatable: myself, my daemon, God, the human race, the world, time, pain, disorder, disgrace and death.
- In the end, today is forever, yesterday is still today, and tomorrow is already today.
- It may be that one reader is all that I deserve. If this is so, I want that reader to be you.
- All great art has madness, and quite a lot of bad art has it, too.
- The purpose of my life is to put off dying as long as possible.
- Merely to survive is to keep the hope greatness, accuracy, and the grace alive.
- It was folly to expect the big things from people. It was enough to get the little things. The biggest thing, of course, was love.
- Art comes from the world, belongs to it, can never escape from it.
- Nothing good ever ends. If it did, there would be no people in the world - no life at all, anywhere. And the world is full of people and full of wonderful life.
- The end of life evokes the errors of it, and a fellow wishes he had known better.
- To remember something or to invent something, it comes to the same thing.
- I have been vitally aware of the Law of Opposites, and this awareness has kept me reasonably serene... the drama of life... the play of truth. the quarrel of fools and frauds, male and female, the classic and the romantic, the disciplined and the free... the comic and the tragic contrasting of the opposites in all areas of possibility and on and on and on.
- The idiot is indeed the good man, but only because he doesn't know any better.
- I did my best, and let me urge you to do your best, too. Isn't it the least we can do for one another?
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