I haven't much opinion of words. They're apt to set fire to a dry tongue, that's what I say.

I have written chiefly because, though I have often dreaded the necessity, I have found it more painful, in the end, not to write.

I would write of the universal, not the provincial, in human nature.... I would write of characters, not of characteristics.

A tragic irony of life is that we so often achieve success or financial independence after the chief reason for which we sought it has passed away.

The hardest thing to believe when you're young is that people will fight to stay in a rut, but not to get out of one.

He felt with the force of a revelation that to throw up the clods of earth manfully is as beneficent as to revolutionize the world. It was not the matter of the work, but the mind that went into it, that counted - and the man who was not content to do small things well would leave great things undone.

marriage is mostly puttin' up with things, I reckon, when it ain't makin' believe.