We Do Choose How We Shall Live

Culture Means, I Think, That You Have Widened Your Experience Enough Through Reading And Through Being A Little Bit Thoughtful About These Things That It Has Changed Your Outlook In Some Ways. And Not Necessarily Made You A Better Human Being But Made You See Things.

I Was Recently Asked What It Takes To Become A Writer. Three Things, I Answered: First, One Must Cultivate Incompetence At Almost Every Other Form Of Profitable Work. This Must Be Accompanied, Second, By A Haughty Contempt For All The Forms Of Work That One Has Established One Cannot Do. To These Two Must Be Joined, Third, The Nuttiness To Believe That Other People Can Be Made To Care About Your Opinions And Views And Be Charmed By The Way You State Them. Incompetence, Contempt, Lunacy—once You Have These In Place, You Are Set To Go.

The Decisive Moment In The Defeat Of Upper Class, Capital-s, Society May Have Come When, In Newspapers All Over The Nation, What Used To Be Call The Society Page Was Replaced By The Style Section.

One Serious Drawback About Letters Is That, In Order To Get Them, One Must Send Some Out. When It Comes To The Mail, I Feel It Is Better To Receive Than To Give.

I Am Basically A Complainer And All The Grounds For Complaint Have Been Swept Out From Under Me.