The great advantage about telling the truth is that nobody ever believes it.

you can give it a long name if you like, but I'm an old-fashioned woman and I call it mother-wit, and it's so rare for a man to have it that if he does you write a book about him and call him Sherlock Holmes.

there is undoubtedly something irritating about the favorites of fortune.

[O]ne can scarcely be frightened off writing what one wants to write for fear an obscure reviewer should patronise one on that account.

To start with invention is the mark of the fertile mind ... and leads later to the interpretation of experience; to start with the reproduction of experience is the infallible index of a barren invention.

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

The education that we have so far succeeded in giving to the bulk of our citizens has produced a generation of mental slatterns.