But that I knew it over twenty-five years ago—that I knew it while The Fountainhead was being rejected by twelve publishers, some of whom declared that it was “too intellectual,” “too controversial” and would not sell because no audience existed for it—that was the difficult part of its history; difficult for me to bear. I mention it here for the sake of any other writer of my kind who might have to face the same battle—as a reminder of the fact that it can be done.

“I want to see, real, living, and in the hours of my own days, that glory I create as an illusion. I want it real. I want to know that there is someone, somewhere, who wants it, too. Or else what is the use of seeing it, and working, and burning oneself for an impossible vision? A spirit, too, needs fuel. It can run dry.”

neither of us has ever wanted or been tempted to settle for anything less than the world

He convinced me of why one cannot give up the world to those one despises.

“My dear fellow, who will let you?” “That’s not the point. The point is, who will stop me?”

The purpose, the site, the material determine the shape.

“I have, let’s say, sixty years to live. Most of that time will be spent working. I’ve chosen the work I want to do. If I find no joy in it, then I’m only condemning myself to sixty years of torture. And I can find the joy only if I do my work in the best way possible to me.”

What are your modernists? A transient mode, exhibitionists trying to attract attention.

An architect is not an end in himself. He is only a small part of a great social whole.

And he thought that the world was opening to him now, like the darkness fleeing before the bobbing headlights. He was free.

He glanced regretfully at his own clothes. He had a great deal to learn in New York.

‘Choose the builder of your home as carefully as you choose the bride to inhabit it.’

“Because I love this earth. That’s all I love. I don’t like the shape of things on this earth. I want to change them.”

He did not know why her presence made him confess things unconfessed in his own mind. He did not know why the victory he came here to share had faded.

Sell it now. It won’t be the same, but you’ve got enough in you. You’ve got what they’ll pay you for, and pay plenty, if you use it their way. Accept them, Roark. Compromise.

Compromise now, because you’ll have to later, anyway, only then you’ll have gone through things you’ll wish you hadn’t. You don’t know. I do. Save yourself from that. Leave me. Go to someone else.

You love your work. God help you, you love it! And that’s the curse.

Do you ever look at the people in the street? Aren’t you afraid of them? I am.

He set his lips defiantly in bitterness against a world he would hate forever.

For two years, Keating’s attempts had broken against the ice of Stengel’s glasses.

marriage is old-fashioned, an economic device to perpetuate the institution of private property,

The touch of her mouth was soft and cold with the snow.

“Don’t you get tired of the heroic?”

He was a master in his own field and he felt no sympathy except for mastery. His view of the world was simple: there were the able and there were the incompetent; he was not concerned with the latter.

He loved buildings. He despised, however, all architects.

“I don’t blame you for the things you’re doing. I’m working for you, I’m taking your money, I have no right to express objections. But this time ... this time the client is asking for it.

“What do you really think of her, Peter? Forget the looks. You’ll see how quickly you’ll forget that. What do you think?”

“A house can have integrity, just like a person,” said Roark, “and just as seldom.”

Your house is made by its own needs. Those others are made by the need to impress. The determining motive of your house is in the house. The determining motive of the other is in the audience.”

if I’ll have to live up to that house.”

“Looking Forward,”

If I found a job, a project, an idea or a person I wanted—I’d have to depend on the whole world. Everything has strings leading to everything else. We’re all so tied together. We’re all in a net, the net is waiting, and we’re pushed into it by one single desire. You want a thing and it’s precious to you. Do you know who is standing ready to tear it out of your hands?

“What do you want? Perfection?” “—or nothing. So, you see, I take the nothing.” “That doesn’t make sense.

“You call that freedom?” “To ask nothing. To expect nothing. To depend on nothing.

The exquisite kindliness of her manner suggested that their relationship was of no possible consequence, that she could not pay him the tribute of hostility. He

“I don’t know exactly. Everything. My whole life. You know, like quicksand. Smooth and natural. With not a thing that you can notice about it or suspect.

He was an eminent young poet. He was pale and slender; he had a soft, sensitive mouth, and eyes hurt by the whole universe.

It had made the routine of his Sunday morning breakfast a profound spiritual experience; he was certain that it was profound, because he didn’t understand it.

There’s no necessity to burden oneself with absolutes.”

to display one’s brains is so vulgar. It’s even more vulgar than to display one’s wealth.”

The secret sorrow of her life was that she had never inspired romance.

“You’re a maggot, Elsie,” she told him once. “You feed on sores.” “Then I’ll never starve,” he answered.

At the age of sixteen, Ellsworth lost interest in religion. He discovered socialism.

His life was crowded, public and impersonal as a city square.

Integrity is the ability to stand by an idea. That presupposes the ability to think. Thinking is something one doesn’t borrow or pawn.

“Don’t worry. They’re all against me. But I have one advantage: they don’t know what they want. I do.”

I’m wiser than you are about some things, because I’m weaker.

The human spirit. The heroic in man. The aspiration and the fulfillment, both. Uplifted in its quest—and uplifting by its own essence. Seeking God—and finding itself. Showing that there is no higher reach beyond its own form....

It is difficult enough to acquire fame. It is impossible to change its nature once you’ve acquired it.

No, you can never ruin an architect by proving that he’s a bad architect. But you can ruin him because he’s an atheist, or because somebody sued him, or because he slept with some woman, or because he pulls wings off bottleflies.

“Howard Roark built a temple to the human spirit. He saw man as strong, proud, clean, wise and fearless. He saw man as a heroic being. And he built a temple to that. A temple is a place where man is to experience exaltation. He thought that exaltation comes from the consciousness of being guiltless, of seeing the truth and achieving it, of living up to one’s highest possibility, of knowing no shame and having no cause for shame, of being able to stand naked in full sunlight. He thought that exaltation means joy and that joy is man’s

He saw man as strong, proud, clean, wise and fearless.

The Stoddard Temple must be destroyed. Not to save men from it, but to save it from men.

Let us destroy, but don’t let us pretend that we are committing an act of virtue.

Let us say that we are moles and we object to mountain peaks.

It’s so graceless, being a martyr. It’s honoring your adversaries too much.

I’m not a brilliant person and that it’s a very big subject, good and evil.

I begin to resent it when people argue with me. I feel that they have no right to minds of their own, that I know best, that I’m the final authority for them.

Men are important only in relation to other men, in their usefulness, in the service they render.

All growth demands destruction.

I can accept anything, except what seems to be the easiest for most people: the halfway, the almost, the just-about, the in-between.

people preferred her not to remove her glasses; her eyes were not good to see.

“Mr. Roark, we’re alone here. Why don’t you tell me what you think of me? In any words you wish. No one will hear us.” “But I don’t think of you.”

One does not die like this, he thought. One must feel a great joy or a healthy terror.

Today, he thought; what was today? Did anything happen that would help me now and give meaning to this moment?

Nothing was gone—except desire; no, more than that—the root, the desire to desire.

He wanted to know what made these people different from those in his neighborhood. It was not the clothes, the carriages or the banks that caught his notice; it was the books. People in his neighborhood had clothes, horse wagons and money; degrees were inessential; but they did not read books. He decided to learn what was read by the people on Fifth Avenue.

The girl with whom he fell in love had an exquisite beauty, a beauty to be worshiped, not desired.

“If you make them indulge themselves, it shames them. But combine the two—and you’ve got them.”

“News,” Gail Wynand told his staff, “is that which will create the greatest excitement among the greatest number. The thing that will knock them silly. The sillier the better, provided there’s enough of them.”

he had the kind of face one could not remember even while looking at it.

If lightning strikes a rotten tree and it collapses, it’s not the fault of the lightning.”

But you have to flatter people whom you despise in order to impress other people who despise you.”

You’re not alive. Where’s your I?”

You wanted a mirror. People want nothing but mirrors around them.

To reflect them while they’re reflecting too.

I’ve probably destroyed you.

“It’s said that the worst thing one can do to a man is to kill his self-respect. But that’s not true. Self-respect is something that can’t be killed. The worst thing is to kill a man’s pretense at it.”

This ship is not for going to places, but for getting away from them.

One can’t love man without hating most of the creatures who pretend to bear his name.

When I look at the ocean, I feel the greatness of man. I think of man’s magnificent capacity that created this ship to conquer all that senseless space. When I look at mountain peaks, I think of tunnels and dynamite. When I look at the planets, I think of airplanes.”

not in sorrow, but in nameless emotion,

Every building is like a person. Single and unrepeatable.”

“I don’t understand literature. It’s nonproductive and a waste of time. Authors will be liquidated.”

the era of humanity requires that every house have corner windows—symbol of the sunshine distributed equally to all.

take this message from me to the women of America: Patience is always rewarded and romance is just around the corner.

there is a stage of worship which makes the worshiper himself an object of reverence.

it was not written in ink, but in the milk of human kindness.

“It’s wonderful. I don’t understand it, but I have the feeling that it’s something very important.”

I’d rather you went on spitting at me than trying to share my offenses.”

“The worst thing about dishonest people is what they think of as honesty,”

love you so much that nothing can matter to me—not even you.

leaned forward,

The young man hoped he would not have to die.

He was a very young man. He had just graduated from college—in the spring of the year 1935—and he wanted to decide whether life was worth living. He did not know that this was the question in his mind. He did not think of dying. He thought only that he wished to find joy and reason and meaning in life—and that none had been offered to him anywhere.

architecture was music in stone—he

He did not know that he had given someone the courage to face a lifetime.

worst curse of poverty was the lack of privacy;

“If you want me, you’ll have to let me do it all, alone. I don’t work with councils.”

“I don’t work with collectives. I don’t consult, I don’t co-operate, I don’t collaborate.”

We live in our minds, and existence is the attempt to bring that life into physical reality, to state it in gesture and form.

“I never meet the men whose work I love. The work means too much to me. I don’t want the men to spoil it. They usually do. They’re an anticlimax to their own talent. You’re not.

“I can’t stand to see my wife among other people. It’s not jealousy. It’s much more and much worse.

a sense of being carried back intact,

And then I looked at that kitten. And I thought that it didn’t know the things I loathed, it could never know. It was clean—clean in the absolute sense, because it had no capacity to conceive of the world’s ugliness. I can’t tell you what relief there was in trying to imagine the state of consciousness inside that little brain, trying to share it, a living consciousness, but clean and free.

No, he thought, I regret nothing. There have been things I missed, but I ask no questions, because I have loved it, such as it has been, even the moments of emptiness, even the unanswered—and that I loved it, that is the unanswered in my life. But I loved it.

what makes people unhappy is not too little choice, but too much,”

“Having to decide, always to decide, torn every which way all of the time. Now in a society of pattern, a man could feel safe.

She had the special faculty of making satin and perfume appear as modern as an aluminum table top.

Her philosophy consisted of one sentence—“I can get away with anything.”

“I? I’m the day after tomorrow.”

four walls and a ceiling is all there is to architecture. The floor is optional. All the rest is capitalistic ostentation.

A typewriter, he thought, presupposes the hand that punches its keys.

Nobody understands what a terrible handicap it is to be born rich.

He had resigned himself to the process of going down, long ago. He had not chosen to resign himself—that would have been a positive decision—it had merely happened and he had let it happen. It had been simple and almost painless, like drowsiness carrying one down to nothing more sinister than a welcome sleep. The dull pain came from wishing to understand why it had happened.

He drank often, without joy.

You’re gaining weight and you look peaked. That’s a bad combination. Absolutely wrong esthetically. Fat people should be happy and jolly.”

“Worry is a waste of emotional reserves. Very foolish. Unworthy of an enlightened person.

I’m a parasite. I’ve been a parasite all my life. You designed my best projects at Stanton. You designed the first house I ever built. You designed the Cosmo-Slotnick Building. I have fed on you and on all the men like you who lived before we were born. The men who designed the Parthenon, the Gothic cathedrals, the first skyscrapers. If they hadn’t existed, I wouldn’t have known how to put stone on stone. In the whole of my life, I haven’t added a new doorknob to what men have done before me. I have taken that which was not mine and given nothing in return.

And have you ever seen an architect who wasn’t screaming for planned cities? I’d like to ask him how he can be so sure that the plan adopted will be his own.

like to receive money for my work. But I can pass that up this time. I like to have people know my work is done by me. But I can pass that up. I like to have tenants made happy by my work. But that doesn’t matter too much. The only thing that matters, my goal, my reward, my beginning, my end is the work itself. My work done my way. Peter, there’s nothing in the world that you can offer me, except this.

He was sick with pity.

This is pity, he thought, and then he lifted his head in wonder. He thought that there must be something terribly wrong with a world in which this monstrous feeling is called a virtue.

As an architect, he’s public property.

there was something worse than a living memory of pain: a dead one.

Others dictated his convictions, which he did not hold, but he was satisfied that others believed he held them.

Personal luxury is a limited endeavor. What they want is ostentation: to show, to stun, to entertain, to impress others. They’re second-handers.

A truly selfish man cannot be affected by the approval of others. He doesn’t need it.”

You can fake virtue for an audience. You can’t fake it in your own eyes.

It’s simple to seek substitutes for competence—such easy substitutes: love, charm, kindness, charity. But there is no substitute for competence.”

“That, precisely, is the deadliness of second-handers. They have no concern for facts, ideas, work. They’re concerned only with people. They don’t ask: ‘Is this true?’ They ask: ‘Is this what others think is true?’ Not to judge, but to repeat. Not to do, but to give the impression of doing. Not creation, but show. Not ability, but friendship. Not merit, but pull. What would happen to the world without those who do, think, work, produce? Those are the egotists. You don’t think through another’s brain and you don’t work through another’s hands.

Yet no man can achieve the kind of absolute humility that would need no self-esteem in any form. He wouldn’t survive.

Every form of happiness is private. Our greatest moments are personal, self-motivated, not to be touched.

If one doesn’t respect oneself one can have neither love nor respect for others.”

if this boat were sinking, I’d give my life to save you. Not because it’s any kind of duty. Only because I like you, for reasons and standards of my own. I could die for you. But I couldn’t and wouldn’t live for you.”

You weren’t born to be a second-hander.

Look at the moral atmosphere of today. Everything enjoyable, from cigarettes to sex to ambition to the profit motive, is considered depraved or sinful. Just

Every system of ethics that preached sacrifice grew into a world power and ruled millions of men.

You must tell people that they’ll achieve a superior kind of happiness by giving up everything that makes them happy.

The farce has been going on for centuries and men still fall for it.

there’s service, there’s someone being served. The man who speaks to you of sacrifice, speaks of slaves and masters. And intends to be the master.

“Honesty is a hard thing to eradicate.

a power there was in words; later, for those who heard them, but first for the one who found them; a healing power, a solution, like the breaking of a barrier. He thought, perhaps the basic secret the scientists have never discovered, the first fount of life, is that which happens when a thought takes shape in words.

They say sound never dies, but travels on in space—what happens to a man’s heartbeats?

My city, he thought, the city I loved, the city I thought I ruled.

Anything may be betrayed, anyone may be forgiven. But not those who lack the courage of their own greatness.

I was not born to be a second-hander.

There are more ways than one to skin a cat, Lance. The skinning isn’t important once you’ve broken its spine.”

The faces stood out, separate, lonely, no two alike. Behind each, there were the years of a life lived or half over, effort, hope and an attempt, honest or dishonest, but an attempt.

The people had come to witness a sensational case, to see celebrities, to get material for conversation, to be seen, to kill time. They would return to unwanted jobs, unloved families, unchosen friends, to drawing rooms, evening clothes, cocktail glasses and movies, to unadmitted pain, murdered hope, desire left unreached, left hanging silently over a path on which no step was taken, to days of effort not to think, not to say, to forget and give in and give up. But each of them had known some unforgotten moment—a morning when nothing had happened, a piece of music heard suddenly and never heard in the same way again, a stranger’s face seen in a bus—a moment when each had known a different sense of living.

“Thousands of years ago, the first man discovered how to make fire.

“But the mind is an attribute of the individual. There is no such thing as a collective brain. There is no such thing as a collective thought. An agreement reached by a group of men is only a compromise or an average drawn upon many individual thoughts. It is a secondary consequence.

“The creator’s concern is the conquest of nature. The parasite’s concern is the conquest of men.

“No man can live for another. He cannot share his spirit just as he cannot share his body.

“In all proper relationships there is no sacrifice of anyone to anyone.

Every creative job is achieved under the guidance of a single individual thought.

The world is perishing from an orgy of self-sacrificing.

the heart of the earth is made of fire. It is held imprisoned and silent.

The self-sufficient, self-confident, the end of ends, the reason unto himself, the joy of living personified.

A man who could have been.

Born without any “religious brain center.” Does not understand or even conceive of the instinct for bowing and submission. His whole capacity for reverence is centered on himself. Needs no mystical “consolation,” no other life. Thinks too much of this world to expect or desire any other....

a natural inferiority complex subconsciously leading to the bringing down of everything into inferiority...

Ayn Rand was concerned primarily with ethics; she wanted to define and present a proper view of man’s life. Here, in a note dated January 15, 1936, is her reason for writing The Fountainhead: