You have been my friend. That in itself is a tremendous thing. I wove my webs for you because I liked you. After all, what's a life, anyway? We're born, we live a little while, we die. A spider's life can't help being something of a mess, with all this trapping and eating flies. By helping you, perhaps I was trying to lift up my life a trifle. Heaven knows anyone's life can stand a little of that.

But real life is only one kind of life—there is also the life of the imagination.

We are such docile creatures, normally, that it takes a virus to jolt us out of life's routine. A couple of days in a fever bed are, in a sense, health-giving; the change in body temperature, the change in pulse , and the change of scene have a restorative effect on the system equal to the hell they raise.

The bonus is really one of the great give-aways in business enterprise. It is the annual salve applied to the conscience of the rich and the wounds of the poor.

Life's accumulation is more discouraging than life itself, when stirred up.

I have no warm up exercises, other than to take an occasional drink.

Anyone who writes down to children is simply wasting his time. You have to write up, not down.