Romance was a game, like bridge, in which you said things instead of playing cards. Like bridge you had to pretend you were playing for money or playing for some stakes.

Hesitation increases in relation to risk in equal proportion to age.

Wearing down seven number two pencils is a good day's work.

Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.

I was young and not gloomy and there were always strange and comic things that happened in the worst time.

A writer should write what he has to say and not speak it.

That seemed to handle it. That was it. Send a girl off with one man. Introduce her to another to go off with him. Now go and bring her back. And sign the wire with love. That was it all right. I went in to lunch.