When it comes to the point, really bad men are just as rare as really good ones.

Captain Shotover: How much does your soul eat? Ellie: Oh, a lot. It eats music and pictures and books and mountains and lakes and beautiful things to wear and nice people to be with.

In literature the ambition of the novice is to acquire the literary language; the struggle of the adept is to get rid of it.

A nap, my friend, is a brief period of sleep which overtakes superannuated persons when they endeavor to entertain unwelcome visitors or to listen to scientific lectures.

Very few people can afford to be poor.

Put an Irishman on the spit and you can always get another Irishman to turn him.

As you say, I am honoured and famous and rich. But as I have to do all the hard work, and suffer an increasing multitude of fools gladly, it does not feel any better than being reviled, infamous and poor, as I used to be.