Above all, do not talk yourself out of good ideas by trying to expound them at haphazard meetings.

Simple English is no one’s mother tongue. It has to be worked for.

Bad writing, it is easily verified, has never kept scholarship from being published.

A man who has both feet planted firmly in the air can be safely called a liberal as opposed to the conservative, who has both feet firmly planted in his mouth.

The danger that may really threaten (crime fiction) is that soon there will be more writers than readers

I have always been - I think any student of history almost inevitably is - a cheerful pessimist.

Machines are admirable and tyrannize only with the user's consent. Where, then, is the enemy? Not where the machine gives relief from drudgery but where human judgment abdicates. The smoothest machine-made product of the age is the organization man, for even the best organizing principle tends to corrupt, and the mechanical principle corrupts absolutely.