A writer's business is minding other people's business ... all the vices of the village gossip are the virtues of the writer.

For a genius to be a genius, he must have a selfless slave between himself and the world.

The human comedy is always tragic, but since its ingredients are always the same - dupe, fox, straight, like burlesque skits - the repetition through the ages is comedy.

I cannot exist without the oxygen of laughter.

Yet better for one of my nature to have it that way than to have life a peaceful, placid flow of quiet contentment. I must have days of rushing excitement.

You woke in the morning with the weight of doom on your head. You lay with eyes shut wondering why you dreaded the day; was it a debt, was it a lost love? -and then you remembered the nightmare....This was no time for beauty, for love, or private future....There was no future; everyone waited, marked time, waited. For what?

Satire is people as they are; romanticism, people as they would like to be; realism, people as they seem with their insides left out.