The world likes humor, but it treats it patronizingly. It decorates its serious artists with laurel, and its wags with Brussels sprouts.

A writer should tend to lift people up, not lower them down.

Don Marquis came down after a month on the wagon, ambled over to the bar, and announced, 'I've conquered that goddamn willpower of mine. Gimme a double Scotch.

The circus comes as close to being the world in microcosm as anything I know; in a way, it puts all the rest of show business in the shade.

The vision of milk and honey, it comes and goes. But the odor of cooking goes on forever.

Americans are willing to go to enormous trouble and expense defending their principles with arms, very little trouble and expense advocating them with words. Temperamentally we are ready to die for certain principles (or, in the case of overripe adults, send youngsters to die), but we show little inclination to advertise the reasons for dying.

As a writing man, or secretary, I have always felt charged with the safekeeping of all unexpected items of worldly and unworldly enchantment, as though I might be held personally responsible if even a small one were to be lost.