I am dead to adverbs; they cannot excite me. To misplace an adverb is a thing which I am able to do with frozen indifference; it can never give me a pang. There are subtleties which I cannot master at all - they confuse me, they mean absolutely nothing to me - and this adverb plague is one of them.

All you need is ignorance and confidence and the success is sure.

Literature is well enough, as a time-passer, and for the improvement and general elevation and purification of mankind, but it has no practical value.

Imagination labors best in distant fields.

The average American may not know who his grandfather was. But the American was, however, one degree better off than the average Frenchman who, as a rule, was in considerable doubt as to who his father was.

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

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