If your mother tells you to do a thing, it is wrong to reply that you won't. It is better and more becoming to intimate that you will do as she bids you, and then afterwards act quietly in the matter according to the dictates of your better judgment.

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

Time and tide wait for no man. A pompous and self-satisfied proverb, and was true for a billion years; but in our day of electric wires and water-ballast we turn it around: Man waits not for time nor tide.

There are things which some people never attempt during their whole lives, but one of these is not poetry. Poetry attacks all human beings sooner or later, and, like the measles, is mild or violent according to the age of the sufferer.

I once sent a dozen of my friends a telegram saying 'flee at once - all is discovered.' They all left town immediately.

When I want to read something nice, I sit down and write it myself.

I try never to let my schooling get in the way of my education.