The most outrageous lies that can be invented will find believers if a person only tells them with all his might.

Information appears to stew out of me naturally, like the precious otter of roses out of the otter.

I am losing enough sleep to supply a worn-out army.

I find no change of consequence in grown people, I do not miss the dead. It does not surprise me to hear that this friend or that friend died at such and such a time, because I fully expected that sort of news. But somehow I had made no calculation on the infants. It never occurred to me that infants grow up...These unexpected changes, from infancy to youth, and from youth to maturity, are by far the most startling things I meet with.

There ain't nothing more to write about and I'm rotten glad of it, because if I'd know'd what trouble it was to make a book, I wouldn't a tackled it.

If everyone was satisfied with himself, there would be no heroes.

I am admonished in many ways that time is pushing me inexorably along. I am approaching the threshold of age; in 1977 I shall be 142.