Burton Rascoe quotes:

A news sense is really a sense of what is important, what is vital, what has color and life - what people are interested in. That's journalism.

I felt exactly like the man in the advertisement who has not devoted fifteen minutes a day to the study of the classics. If only (I thought) I had devoted fifteen minutes a day to the cultivation of the aesthetic attitude! I could bound Afghanistan.

What no wife of a writer can ever understand is that a writer is working when he's staring out of the window.

Men and women who are lonely create. Those who are gregarious rarely do... Any poet would rather bed with a girl than write a poem about her. All art is the result of frustration. Art is energy deflected from its normal course in action.

American literature has been, and is, singularly deficient in established critics who have anything like a rational conception of their jobs. The majority, initiate in a few of the patent rituals of Aristotle and Quintilian , don the forbidding robes of high priests to Sweetness and Light, and go about their business much as if the idea were to keep all they know to themselves.

I am so constituted that I had rather read bad stuff than nothing.