There are no second acts in American lives.

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.

At eighteen our convictions are hills from which we look; at forty-five they are caves in which we hide.

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

The compensation of a very early success is a conviction that life is a romantic matter. In the best sense one stays young.

Men get to be a mixture of the charming mannerisms of the women they have known.

Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat.

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

The easiest way to get a reputation is to go outside the fold, shout around for a few years as a violent atheist or a dangerous radical, and then crawl back to the shelter.

For awhile after you quit Keats all other poetry seems to be only whistling or humming.

Trouble has no necessary connection with discouragement. Discouragement has a germ of its own, as different from trouble as arthritis is different from a stiff joint.

Though the Jazz Age continued it became less and less an affair of youth. The sequel was like a children's party taken over by the elders.

Only remember west of the Mississippi it's a little more look, see, act. A little less rationalize, comment, talk.

In a real dark night of the soul, it is always three o'clock in the morning, day after day.

Often people display a curious respect for a man drunk, rather like the respect of simple races for the insane... There is something awe-inspiring in one who has lost all inhibitions.

Everybody's youth is a dream, a form of chemical madness.

My idea is always to reach my generation. The wise writer writes for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterward.

Either you think, or else others have to think for you and take power from you, pervert and discipline your natural tastes, civilize and sterilize you.

It occurred to me that there was no difference between men, in intelligence or race, so profound as the difference between the sick and the well.

The faces of most American women over thirty are relief maps of petulant and bewildered unhappiness.

Switzerland is a country where very few things begin, but many things end.

When people are taken out of their depths they lose their heads, no matter how charming a bluff they may put up.

No such thing as a man willing to be honest - that would be like a blind man willing to see.

There are no second acts in American lives.

To a profound pessimist about life, being in danger is not depressing.

Some men have a necessity to be mean, as if they were exercising a faculty which they had to partially neglect since early childhood.

Personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures.

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

Speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again.

Genius is the ability to put into effect what is on your mind.

To write it, it took three months; to conceive it three minutes; to collect the data in it all my life.

Her body calculated to a millimeter to suggest a bud yet guarantee a flower.

Genius goes around the world in its youth incessantly apologizing for having large feet. What wonder that later in life it should be inclined to raise those feet too swiftly to fools and bores.

No decent career was ever founded on a public.

Action is character.

I've been drunk for about a week now, and I thought it might sober me up to sit in a library.

The idea that to make a man work you've got to hold gold in front of his eyes is a growth, not an axiom. We've done that for so long that we've forgotten there's any other way.

Great art is the contempt of a great man for small art.

It is sadder to find the past again and find it inadequate to the present than it is to have it elude you and remain forever a harmonious conception of memory.

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

The victor belongs to the spoils.

What'll we do with ourselves this afternoon? And the day after that, and the next thirty years?

I'm a romantic; a sentimental person thinks things will last, a romantic person hopes against hope that they won't.

First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you.

The world, as a rule, does not live on beaches and in country clubs.

Nothing is as obnoxious as other people's luck.

You don't write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say.

Forgotten is forgiven.

Life is essentially a cheat and its conditions are those of defeat; the redeeming things are not happiness and pleasure but the deeper satisfactions that come out of struggle.