The compensation of a very early success is a conviction that life is a romantic matter. In the best sense one stays young.

Then she added in a sort of childish delight: 'We'll be poor, won't we? Like people in books. And I'll be an orphan and utterly free. Free and poor! What fun!' She stopped and raised her lips to him in a delighted kiss. 'It's impossible to be both together,' said John grimly. 'People have found that out. And I should choose to be free as preferable of the two.

Often a man can play the helpless child in front of a woman, but he can almost never bring it off when he feels most like a helpless child.

That was always my experience-a poor boy in a rich town; a poor boy in a rich boy's school; a poor boy in a rich man's club at Princeton .... However, I have never been able to forgive the rich for being rich, and it has colored my entire life and works.

Advertising is a racket, like the movies and the brokerage business. You cannot be honest without admitting that its constructive contribution to humanity is exactly minus zero.

Often I think writing is a sheer paring away of oneself leaving always something thinner, barer, more meagre.

Your first most typical figure in any new place turns out to be a bluff or a local nuisance.