How do people go to sleep? I'm afraid I've lost the knack. I might try busting myself smartly over the temple with the night-light. I might repeat to myself, slowly and soothingly, a list of quotations beautiful from minds profound; if I can remember any of the damn things.

There's life for you. Spend the best years of your life studying penmanship and rhetoric and syntax and Beowulf and George Eliot, and then somebody steals your pencil.

[On hearing that President Coolidge was dead:] How can you tell?

Then if my friendships break and bend, There's little need to cry The while I know that every foe Is faithful till I die.

I fell into writing, I suppose, being one of those awful children who wrote verses. I went to a convent in New York-the Blessed Sacrament... I was fired from there, finally, for a lot of things, among them my insistence that the Immaculate Conception was spontaneous combustion.

And I'll stay off Verlaine too; he was always chasing Rimbauds.

Gratitude - the meanest and most snivelling attribute in the world.