By the age of eighteen, a human has acquired enough joy and heartache to provide the food of reflection for a century.

Life is hard? True - but let's love it anyhow, though it breaks every bone in our bodies.

A house built on greed cannot long endure.

Indolence and melancholy: Each generates the other. If one can speak of such feeble passions as generating anything.

No man is wise enough to be another man's master. Each man's as good as the next -- if not a damn sight better.

My notion of a great novel is something like a five-hundred-page shaggy-dog story, with only the punch line omitted.

Wealth should come like manna from heaven, unearned and uncalled for. Money should be like grace -- a gift. It is not worth sweating and scheming for.