Things have dropped from me. I have outlived certain desires; I have lost friends, some by death... others through sheer inability to cross the street.

At forty my faculties may have closed up like flowers at evening, leaving me unable to write my memoirs with a fitting and discreet inaccuracy, or, having written them, unable to carry them to the publisher.

I have lived in the East for nearly thirty years now, but many of my books prove that I am never very far away from Ohio in my thoughts, and that the clocks that strike in my dreams are often the clocks of Columbus.

Humor is emotional chaos remembered in tranquility.

One has but to observe a community of beavers at work in a stream to understand the loss in his sagacity, balance, co-operation, competence, and purpose which Man has suffered since he rose up on his hind legs. He began to chatter and he developed Reason, Thought, and Imagination, qualities which would get the smartest group of rabbits or orioles in the world into inextricable trouble overnight.

I could have killed Gregory Fitzhurst at three hundred feet with my left hand.

I have the reputation for having read all of Henry James. Which would argue a misspent youth and middle age.