I don’t much care where I am anymore, nor expect very much from places.

Your first most typical figure in any new place turns out to be a bluff or a local nuisance.

I suspect tragedy in the American countryside because all the people capable of it move to the big towns at twenty.

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

Premature success gives one an almost mystical conception of destiny as opposed to will power—at its worst the Napoleonic delusion.

1 just couldn't make the grade as a hack—that, like everything else, requires a certain practiced excellence.

If all your clothes are worn to the same state, it means you go out too much.

So there was not an “I” anymore—not a basis on which I could organize my self-respect—save my limitless capacity for toil that it seemed I possessed no more.

It was strange to have no self—to be like a little boy left alone in a big house, who knew that now he could do anything he wanted to do, but found that there was nothing that he wanted to do.

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