Only a jackass ever talks over his affairs with a woman, whether she be his sweetheart, wife, or sister, or mother.

At eight or nine, I suppose intelligence is no more than a small spot of light on the floor of a large and murky room.

The Catholic clergy seldom bother to make their arguments plausible; it is plain that they have little respect for human intelligence, and indeed little belief in its existence.

For the habitual truth-teller and truth-seeker, indeed, the whole world has very little liking. He is always unpopular.

There are no dull subjects. There are only dull writers.

The best years are the forties; after fifty a man begins to deteriorate, but in the forties he is at the maximum of his villainy.

In my day a reporter who took an assignment was wholly on his own until he got back to the office, and even then he was little molested until his copy was turned in at the desk; today he tends to become only a homunculus at the end of a telephone wire, and the reduction of his observations to prose is commonly farmed out to literary castrati who never leave the office, and hence never feel the wind of the world in their faces or see anything with their own eyes.