I am admonished in many ways that time is pushing me inexorably along. I am approaching the threshold of age; in 1977 I shall be 142. This is no time to be flitting about the earth. I must cease from the activities proper to youth and begin to take on the dignities and gravities and inertia proper to that season of honorable senility which is on its way.

The heart is the real fountain of youth.

You take the lies out of him, and he'll shrink to the size of your hat; you take the malice out of him, and he'll disappear.

A classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.

We have not the reverent feeling for the rainbow that the savage has, because we know how it is made. We have lost as much as we gained by prying into that matter.

The soul and substance of what customarily ranks as patriotism is moral cowardice -- and always has been.

The critic's symbol should be the tumble-bug: he deposits his egg in somebody else's dung, otherwise he could not hatch it.