I have just been refining the room in which I sit, yet I sometimes doubt that a writer should refine or improve his workroom by so much as a dictionary: one thing leads to another and the first thing you know he has a stuffed chair and is fast asleep in it.

A good many of the special words of business seem designed more to express the user's dreams than to express a precise meaning.

It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer.

Children hold spring so tightly in their brown fists-just as grownups, who are less sure of it, hold it in their hearts.

We grow tyrannical fighting tyranny. . . . The most alarming spectacle today is not the spectacle of the atomic bomb in an unfederated world, it is the spectacle of the Americans beginning to accept the device of loyalty oaths and witch hunts, beginning to call anybody they don't like a Communist.

Life is like writing with a pen. You can cross out your past but you can't erase it.

Why is it, do you suppose, that an Englishman is unhappy until he has explained America?