Now, if Mr. Shaw and Mr. Saroyan are poles apart, no comparison between the two, one great and the other nothing, one a genius and the other a charlatan, let me repeat that if you must know which writer has influenced my writing when influences are real and for all I know enduring, then that writer has been George Bernard Shaw. I shall in my own day influence a young writer or two somewhere or other, and no one need worry about that. Young Shaw, hello out there.

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 …

Their singing wasn't particularly good, but the feeling with which they sang was not bad at all.

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 t…

Writers may be classified as meteors, planets, and fixed stars. A meteor makes a striking effect for a moment. You look up and cry 'There!' and it is gone fore…

Most of us balk at her soporific rigmaroles, her echolaliac incantations, her half-witted-sounding catalogues on numbers; most of us read her less and less. Ye…

At present, I am a poet trying to be a soldier. To tell the truth, I am not interested in writing nowadays, except in so far as writing is the expression of so…