No man could bring himself to reveal his true character, and, above all, his true limitations as a citizen and a Christian, his true meannesses, his true imbecilities, to his friends, or even to his wife. Honest autobiography is therefore a contradiction in terms: the moment a man considers himself, even in petto, he tries to gild and fresco himself. Thus a man's wife, however realistic her view of him, always flatters him in the end, for the worst she sees in him is appreciably better, by the time she sees it, than what is actually there.

What is too often forgotten is that nature obviously intends the botched to die, and that every interference with that benign process is full of dangers.

The central belief of every moron is that he is the victim of a mysterious conspiracy against his common rights and true deserts.

No reporter of my generation, whatever his genius, ever really rated spats and a walking stick until he had covered both a lynching and a revolution.

A bad artist almost always tries to conceal his incompetence by whooping up a new formula.

There is in writing the constant joy of sudden discovery, of happy accident.

Confidence: The feeling that makes one believe a man, even when one knows that one would lie in his place