Quotes from Robert McAlmon

Wealth, the war [WW1], and the phobias, manias, dementias, prejudices and terrors that come from both, were the dominant factors.

I never felt myself an expatriate or anything but an American, but not through some excess of patriotism. My country is much too polyglot of race, type, and variety of faith, political and otherwise, for me to discover exactly to which qualities one would have to remain loyal in order to be a hundred per cent American.

Of cliques, groups and social intrigues] ... why be alive if you can't like the battle of measuring your contempt or indifferent or interest against that of others?

I had some time ago decided that the money-makers on the grand scale are monomaniacs and fanatics and self-willed.

nothing can compete with the vulgarity of snobbish or bought correct taste.

There's the belief that witty people are cruel, but they are perhaps less dangerous the the adulators who insist upon finding qualities in us which we have no desire to possess.

I don't see how people go on living as stupid as some of them are.

There's never been a time in my life that I wasn't impatient, ecstatic one moment, morbid as hell another, and ready to be reckless almost any time.

I suppose I'm ambitious for something in spite of the fact that most things known as success don't inspire me to try for them at all.