My father and I were always on the most distant terms when I was a boy--a sort of armed neutrality, so to speak. At irregular intervals this neutrality was broken, and suffering ensued; but I will be candid enough to say that the breaking and the suffering were always divided up with strict impartiality between us--which is to say, my father did the breaking, and I did the suffering.

Once you've put one of his [Henry James] books down, you simply can't pick it up again.

You can't keep a juvenile moral institution alive on two displays of its sash per year.

I am always on the side of the revolutionists, because there never was a revolution unless there were some oppressive and intolerable conditions against which to revolute.

Truth is stranger than fiction-to some people, but I am measurably familiar with it.

A man can be a Christian or a patriot, but he can't legally be a Christian and a patriot - except in the usual way: one of the two with the mouth, the other with the heart.

I can teach anybody how to get what they want out of life. The problem is that I can't find anybody who can tell me what they want.