“Ask the average American what is the salient passion in his emotional armamentarium—what is the idea that lies at the bottom of all his other ideas—and it is very probable that, nine times out of ten, he will nominate his hot and unquenchable rage for liberty. He regards himself, indeed, as the chief exponent of liberty in the whole world, and all its other advocates as no more than his followers, half timorous and half envious. To question his ardour is to insult him as grievously as if one questioned the honour of the republic or the chastity of his wife. And yet it must be plain to any dispassionate observer that this ardour, in the course of a century and a half, has lost a large part of its old burning reality and descended to the estate of a mere phosphorescent superstition.”

“A writer always wears glasses and never combs his hair. Half the time he feels angry about everything and the other half depressed. He spends most of his life in bars, arguing with other dishevelled, bespectacled writers. He says very 'deep' things. He always has amazing ideas for the plot of his next novel, and hates the one he has just published.”

“He entered a confectioner's shop to rest, once. He was in a state of nervous excitement and perturbation; he noticed nothing and no one; and he felt a craving for solitude, to be alone with his thoughts and his emotions, and to give himself up to them passively. He loathed the idea of trying to answer the questions that would rise up in his heart and mind. "I am not to blame for all this," he thought to himself, half unconsciously.”

“You should never lie till ten. There's the very prime of the morning long gone before that time. A person who has not done one half of his day's work by ten o'clock, runs a chance of leaving the other half undone.”

“Every American is at heart an Anarchist. He hates constraint, he hates regulation, he hates law. The most elementary arrangements of an ordered community, as we should think, are to him irksome and intolerable encroachments on his liberty. But there is one point on which the conservatism of America would put the very Czar to shame. The American will tolerate much, but he will have no tampering with the rights of property. He may have nothing himself, but he will guard the havings of others with all the jealousy a man usually gives only to his own.In a land where you may be a pauper to-day and a millionaire to-morrow ; where it is the commonest experience to meet a man who has made, and lost, half-a- dozen fortunes in half-a-dozen different professions in as many years — here a man looks upon the wealth of others as held in trust for himself, and will suffer no diminution of its sanctity. Socialism, anarchism, any "ism" that smacks of confiscation or nationalisation, is a far more heinous horror in this land of democracy than anywhere in the king- ridden East”

“Half the time I have no idea what I'm doing. The other half, I'm trying to undo what I did when I didn't know what I was doing. That leaves, let's see now . . . one more half. That last half is divided into three halves, one for working, one for writing, and one for asking the mother of all rhetorical questions . . . WTF?”