I will now claim - until dispossesed - that I was the first person in the world to apply the typewriter to literature. ... The early machine was full of caprices, full of defects- devilish ones. It had as many immoralities as the machine of today has virtues. After a year or two I found that it was degrading my character, so I thought I would give it to Howells. ... He took it home to Boston, and my morals began to improve, but his have never recovered.

There is no sadder sight than a young pessimist.

Cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education.

Humor, to be comprehensible to anybody, must be built upon a foundation with which he is familiar. If he can't see the foundation the superstructure is to him merely a freak -- like the Flatiron building without any visible means of support -- something that ought to be arrested.

None of us can be as great as God, but any of us can be as good.

We were surprised how closely the cuckoo imitated the clock-and yet, of course, it could never have heard a clock.

So I became a newspaperman. I hated to do it but I couldnt find honest employment.