There can be no doubt that smoking nowadays is largely a miserable automatic business. People use tobacco without ever taking an intelligent interest in it. They do not experiment, compare, fit the tobacco to the occasion. A man should always be pleasantly conscious of the fact that he is smoking.

Marriage is like paying an endless visit in your worst clothes.

The people who pretend that dying is rather like strolling into the next room always leave me unconvinced. Death, like birth, must be a tremendous event.

There is romance, the genuine glinting stuff, in typewriters, and not merely in their development from clumsy giants into agile dwarfs, but in the history of their manufacture, which is filled with raids, battles, lonely pioneers, great gambles, hope, fear, despair, triumph. If some of our novels could be written by the typewriters instead of on them, how much better they would be.

If there is one thing left that I would like to do, it's to write something really beautiful. And I could do it, you know. I could still do it.

Write as often as possible, not with the idea at once of getting into print, but as if you were learning an instrument.

I fancy that the Hell of Too Many People would occupy a respectable place in the hierarchy of infernal regions.