Good manners: The noise you don't make when you're eating soup.

There once was a student named Bessor Whose knowledge grew lessor and lessor. It at last grew so small He knew nothing at all, And today he's a college professor!

Everybody was being decent, and when people are decent, thing work out for everybody. That has been my theory all through life. If you're making money, let the other fellow make it too. If somebody's getting hurt, it's bad, but if you can work a thing out so that everybody profits that's the ideal business.

The fundamental difference between the mystery story and the ghost story is the fact that a mystery demands a solution for its effectiveness; a ghost story is necessarily unsolvable; the reader must be willing to accept the fact that nothing is proved.

Most of the things that are supposed to be so objectionable in books are things that every teenager, in the United States, not only knows, but has talked about at length in school, or on the way home from school.

The fact that we don't read more books in America can be traced squarely to the fact that we have newspapers that are about a hundred times as big as the newspapers anywhere else.

There is a mass of people, we might as well admit, who if they weren't watching television, would be doing absolutely nothing else.