The game of golf would lose a great deal if croquet mallets and billiard cues were allowed on the putting green.

My attitude toward punctuation is that it ought to be as conventional as possible. The game of golf would lose a good deal if croquet mallets and billiard cues were allowed on the putting green. You ought to be able to show that you can do it a good deal better than anyone else with the regular tools before you have a license to bring in your own improvements.

Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don’t know the ten-dollar words. I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use.

The educated man is the man who can do something. The quality of his work marks the degree of his education.

There is no night life in Spain. They stay up late but they get up late. That is not night life. That is delaying the day.

Later he had seen the things that he could never think of and later still he had seen much worse.

The parody is the last refuge of the frustrated writer. Parodies are what you write when you are associate editor of the Harvard Lampoon. The greater the work of literature, the easier the parody. The step up from writing parodies is writing on the wall above the urinal.