There were creative-writin g teachers long before there were creative-writin g courses, and they were called and continue to be called editors.

All the people of all the nations which had fought in the First World War were silent during the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of Armistice Day, which was the eleventh day of the eleventh month. It was during that minute in nineteen hundred and eighteen, that millions upon millions of human beings stopped butchering one another. I have talked to old men who were on battlefields during that minute. They have told me in one way or another that the sudden silence was the Voice of God. So we still have among us some men who can remember when God spoke clearly to mankind.

Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.

Well, it's practically over, thank God - I'm 83, there won't be that much more of it to put up with I don't think!

What do men want? They want a lot of pals, and they wish that people wouldn't get so mad at them.

I myself feel that our country, for whose Constitution I fought in a just war, might as well have been invaded by Martians and body snatchers. Sometimes I wish it had been. What has happened, though, is that it has been taken over by means of the sleaziest, low-comedy, Keystone Cops-style coup d'etat imaginable.

That is my principal objection to life, I think: It's too easy, when alive, to make perfectly horrible mistakes.