I am not mad. I am eccentric perhaps--at least certain people say so; but as regards my profession. I am very much as one says, 'all there.

Mr. Jesmond made a peculiar noise rather like a hen who has decided to lay an egg and then thought better of it.

The truth often does sound unconvincing.

There's no agony like [getting started]. You sit in a room, biting pencils, looking at a typewriter, walking about, or casting yourself down on a sofa, feeling you want to cry your head off.

We owe most of our great inventions and most of the achievements of genius to idleness either enforced or voluntary.

If you place your head in a lion's mouth, then you cannot complain one day if he happens to bite it off.

He laughs best who laughs at the end.