I have read books about the behavior of mobs - The Mob by Le Bon, if I remember rightly, was one - about the crime in children, and the genius in them, about the greatest bodies of things, and about the littlest of them. I have been fascinated by it all, grateful for it all, grateful for the sheer majesty of the existence of ideas, stories, fables, and paper and ink and print and books to hold them all together for a man to take aside and examine alone. But the man I liked most and the man who seemed to remind me of myself - of what I really was and would surely become - was George Bernard Shaw.

I have read Schopenhauer at the age of twelve with no bewilderment and no contempt of his contempt for the world and its strange inhabitants, and no contempt f…

When, at the age of eighteen, I was the manager of the Postal Telegraph office at 21 Taylor Street in San Francisco, I remember having been asked by the clerk …

I myself, as a person, have been influenced by many writers and many things, and my writing has felt the impact of the writing of many writers, some relatively…

Le veritable lieu de naissance est celui ou l'on a porte pour la premiere fois un coup d'oeil intelligent sur soi-meme: mes premieres patries ont ete des livre…

Some books makes me want to go adventuring, others feel that they have saved me the trouble.

You hear all this whining going on, 'Where are our great writers?' The thing I might feel doleful about is: Where are the readers?