“Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.”

“A Puritan is not against bullfighting because of the pain it gives the bull, but because of the pleasure it gives the spectators.”

“The objection to Puritans is not that they try to make us think as they do, but that they try to make us do as they think.”

“Socialism, Puritanism, Philistinism, Christianity—he saw them all as allotropic forms of democracy, as variations upon the endless struggle of quantity against quality, of the weak and timorous against the strong and enterprising, of the botched against the fit.”

“Happiness is the china shop; love is the bull.”

“There is in writing the constant joy of sudden discovery, of happy accident.”

“Conscience is the inner voice that warns us somebody may be looking.”