Quotes from Sloan Wilson

I don't have any contempt for the men who have to have jobs and have to commute and have to pay the mortgage and have to get their kids an education. To me, that's the backbone of America, to coin a phrase.

Success in almost any field depends more on energy and drive than it does on intelligence. This explains why we have so many stupid leaders.

It is impossible to treat a child too well. Children are spoiled by being ignored too much or by harshness, not by kindness.

When it comes to sending my children to college, I want the best education. It's the only thing I'm really leaving them - a good education.

The only real reason to write professionally is that you love it enough.

A man who wants time to read and write must let the grass grow long.

You're not going to go far unless you're a workaholic.

A man who wants time to read and write must let the grass grow long.

Success in almost any field depends more on energy and drive than it does on intelligence. This explains why we have so many stupid leaders.

The hardest part of raising a child is teaching them to ride bicycles. A shaky child on a bicycle for the first time needs both support and freedom. The realization that this is what the child will always need can hit hard.

The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit

The definition of a beautiful woman is one who loves me.

Only masochists can get along without editing their own memories.

How smoothly one becomes, not a cheat, exactly, not really a liar, just a man who'll say anything for pay.

Believe me, I want you to have a good time,' he said gently, 'but people who have that primarily in mind rarely accomplish it.

I could get a job in an advertising agency. I'll write copy telling people to eat more cornflakes and smoke more and more cigarettes and buy more refrigerators and automobiles, until they explode with happiness.

That had been the trouble with him and Betsy: what with his brooding about the past and worrying about the future, there had never been any present at all.

Another statistical fact came to him then, a fact which he knew would be ridiculously melodramatic to put into an application for a job at the United Broadcasting Corporation, or to think about at all. He hadn't thought about this for a long while. It wasn't a thing he had deliberately tried to forget – he simply hadn't thought about it for quite a few years. It was the unreal-sounding, probably irrelevant, but quite accurate fact that he had killed seventeen men.

A man who wants time to read and write lets the grass grow long.

It doesn't really matter. Here goes nothing. It will be interesting to see what happens.

A birth usually has more consequences than a death.

How curious it was to find that apparently nothing was ever really forgotten, that the past was never really gone, that it was always lurking, ready to destroy the present, or at least to make the present seem absurd.

O problema não era o fato de ele não mais acreditar no sonho; o problema era ele nem sequer achar sua improbabilidade interessante ou triste. Como um velho, preocupava-se com o passado e não com o futuro.

Um ato a mais de brutalidade não faria o mundo acabar. Mas eu não vou fazer isso. Não posso fazer nada pelo mundo, mas posso colocar minha própria vida em ordem.