If you expect the worst from a person you can never be disappointed.

Sanity is a handicap and liability if you're living in a mad world.

Ignorance and poverty are the best condiments for the great feast of the world, but the inexperienced and poor are never invited to it.

laws and conditions appropriate to a mechanical creation, against this I raise my sword-pen.

If you expect the worst from a person, you can't ever be disappointed... The pessimist takes a sort of gloomy pleasure in observing the depths to which human behaviour can sink. The more sin he sees, the more his belief in Original Sin is confirmed. Everyone likes to have his deepest convictions confirmed; that is one of the most abiding of human satisfaction.

We all need money, but there are degrees of desperation.

A man can write one book that can be great, but this doesn't make him a great writer-just the writer of a great book. . . I think a writer has to extend very widely, as well as plunge very deep, to be a great novelist.