The understanding smile of an old wife to her husband is one of the loveliest things in the world.

An ideal wife is any woman who has an ideal husband.

Gossip is never fatal until it is denied.

Whatever does not pretend at all has style enough.

Boyhood is the longest time in life for a boy. The last term of the school-year is made of decades, not of weeks, and living through them is like waiting for the millennium.

The only good in pretending is the fun we get out of fooling ourselves that we fool somebody.

Take your work seriously but never take yourself seriously and do not take what happens either to yourself or your work seriously.

Destiny has a constant passion for the incongruous.

The only safe male rebuke to a scornful female is to stay away from her - especially if that is what she desires.

It is love in old age, no longer blind, that is true love. For the love's highest intensity doesn't necessarily mean it's highest quality.

There aren't any old times. When times are gone they're not old, they're dead! There aren't any times but new times!

Every decent con man knows that the simplest truth is more powerful than even the most elaborate lie.

Sometimes what we want or don't want doesn't matter in the end. Sometimes magic doesn't listen after all.

Offhand, the only North American writers I can think of who have come from a background of rural poverty and gone on to write about it have been Negroes.

The more I make stuff, the more I become aware of when I feel like I'm making bullshit or feel like I'm making something I can stand behind.

What renders other people's vanity insufferable is that it wounds our own.

It's almost two societies, the living and the dead, and you live with them both.

Wouldn't it be fun if all the castles in the air which we make could come true and we could live in them?

I thought the Secret Service would protect me from the press, but they were at my house to protect me from assassins with guns, not with assassins with pencils.

The vital energies regulate themselves naturally without compulsive duty or compulsive morality both of which are sure signs of existing antisocial impulses.

A good leader must be fair.