Heroics that don't come off are the very essence of burlesque.

But you see, I can believe a thing without understanding it. It's all a matter of training.

The one thing which seems to me quite impossible is to take into consideration the kind of book one is expected to write; surely one can only write the book that is there to be written.

First I believe it to be a grave mistake to present Christianity as something charming and popular with no offense inn it.

For we let our young men and women go out unarmed in a day when armor was never so necessary. By teaching them to read, we have left them at the mercy of the printed word. By the invention of the film and the radio, we have made certain that no aversion to reading shall secure them from the incessant battery of words, words, words. They do not know what the words mean; they do not know how to ward them off or blunt their edge or fling them back; they are prey to words in their emotions instead of being the masters of them in their intellects.

I have never regretted Paradise Lost since I discovered that it contained no eggs-and-bacon.

The keeping of an idle woman is a badge of superior social status.