We are uneasy with an affectionate man, for we are positive he wants something of us, particularly our love.

Of all the animals on earth, none is so brutish as man when he seeks the delirium of coition.

To write is a humiliation.

Hardly a book of human worth, be it heaven's own secret, is honestly placed before the reader; it is either shunned, given a Periclean funeral oration in a hundred and fifty words, or interred in the potter's field of the newspapers back pages.

We are a most solitary people, and we live, repelled by one another, in the gray, outcast cities of Cain.

Men are mad most of their lives; few live sane, fewer die so. The acts of people are baffling unless we realize that their wits are disordered. Man is driven to justice by his lunacy.

Though man is the only beast that can write, he has small reason to be proud of it. When he utters something that is wise it is nothing that the river horse does not know, and most of his creations are the result of accident.