Truth is often terribly thin, don't you think?

A thousand people drowned in floods in China are news: a solitary child drowned in a pond is tragedy.

Most people's first books are their best anyways. It's the one they wanted most to write.

A man may own a ship, but unless he is captain of a crew he goes where the ship goes.

Fasting was good for the imagination but bad for logic.

It is the utterly destructive quality. When you say vanity, you are thinking of the kind that admires itself in mirrors and buys things to deck itself out in. But that is merely personal conceit. Real vanity is something quite different. A matter not of person but of personality. Vanity says, "I must have this because I am me." It is a frightening thing because it is incurable.

Letterwriting is the natural outlet of the "odds." The busy-bodies, the idle, the perverted, the cranks, the feel-it-my-duties ... Also the plain depraved. They all write letters. It's their safe outlet, you see. They can be as interfering, as long-winded, as obscene, as pompous, as one-idea'd, as they like on paper, and no one can kick them for it. So they write. My God, how they write!