The things we laugh at are awful while they are going on, but get funny when we look back. And other people laugh because they've been through it too. The closest thing to humor is tragedy.

It is better to have loafed and lost than never to have loafed at all.

He who hesitates is sometimes saved.

Ours is a precarious language, as every writer knows, in which the merest shadow line often separates affirmation from negation, sense from nonsense, and one sex from the other.

The laughter of man is more terrible than his tears, and takes more forms-hollow, heartless, mirthless, maniacal.

Man has gone long enough, or even too long, without being man enough to face the simple truth that the trouble with man is Man.

Sanity, soundness, and sincerity, of which gleams and strains can still be found in the human brain under powerful microscopes, flourish only in a culture of clarification, which is now becoming harder and harder to detect with the naked eye.

Until a man can quit talking loudly to himself in order to shout down the memories of blunderings and gropings, he is in no shape for the painstaking examination of distress.

A burden in the bush is worth two on your hands.

Science has zipped the atom open in a dozen places, it can read the scrawlings on the Rosetta stone as glibly as a literary critic explains Hart Crane, but it doesn't know anything about playwrights.