Never have a battle of wits with an unarmed person.

Who knows, he may grow up to be President someday, unless they hang him first!" Aunt Polly about Tom Sawyer

All of us contain Music & Truth, but most of us can't get it out.

Courage is not the absence of fear, but the mastery of it.

I like a good story well told. That is the reason I am sometimes forced to tell them myself.

To get the right word in the right place is a rare achievement. To condense the diffused light of a page of thought into the luminous flash of a single sentence, is worthy to rank as a prize composition just by itself...Anybody can have ideas--the difficulty is to express them without squandering a quire of paper on an idea that ought to be reduced to one glittering paragraph.

Don't look at the world with your hands in your pockets. To write about it you have to reach out and touch it.