How do you tell a valuable French book?' 'First there are the pictures. Then it is a question of the quality of the pictures. Then it is the binding. If a book is good, the owner will have it bound properly. All books in English are bound, but bound badly. There is no way of judging them.

Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.

He saw the girl watching him and he smiled at her. It was an old smile that he had been using for fifty years, ever since he first smiled.

Today is only one day in all the days that will ever be. But what will happen in all the other days that ever come can depend on what you do today. It's been that way all this year. It's been that way so many times. All of war is that way.

To hell with the Church when it becomes a State and the hell with the State when it becomes a Church.

Men cannot act before the camera in the presence of death.

Perhaps I should not have been a fisherman, he thought. But that was the thing that I was born for.