Speak what you think today in words as hard as cannon balls, and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict everything you said today.

Anybody can be good in the country. There are no temptations there.

Every real thought on every real subject knocks the wind out of somebody or other.

Read over your compositions, and when you meet a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.

We should always aim to read something different=not only the writers with whom we agree, but those with whom we are ready to do battle. Their point of view challenges us to examine the truth and to test their views...and let us not comment on nor criticize writers of whom we have heard only second-hand, or third-hand without troubling to read their works for ourselves...Don't be afraid of new ideas.

Leaders must draw the best out of people, and friendship does that far better than prolonged argument or mere logic.

No leader lives a day without criticism, and humility will never be more on trial than when criticism comes.

We can only know and understand ourselves fully through others — through the way we experience others and ourselves in relation to others, and the way others experience us.

New York gets god awful cold in the winter but there's a feeling of wacky comradeship somewhere in the streets.

As we rode in the bus in the weird phosphorescent void of the Lincoln Tunnel we leaned on each other with fingers waving and yelled and talked excitedly, and I was beginning to get the bug like Dean.

Allen was "queer in those days, experimenting with himself to the hilt, and Neal saw that, and a former boyhood hustler himself in the Denver night, and wanting dearly to learn how to write poetry like Allen, the first thing you know he was attacking Allen with a great amorous soul such as only a conman can have.

This may sound a little bit idealistic, but when I go to my blog, my Facebook page, my Twitter account, I talk to different people from all over the world, and you see how it's easy to establish a dialogue.