Whose property is my body? Probably mine. I so regard it. If I experiment with it, who must be answerable? I, not the State. If I choose injudiciously, does the state die? Oh, no.

Optimist: day dreamer more elegantly spelled.

Another editor. That thing behind his ear is his pencil. Whenever he finds a bright thing in your manuscript he strikes it out with that. That does him good, and makes him smile and show his teeth, the way he is doing in the picture. This one has just been striking out a smart thing, and now he is sitting there with his thumbs in his vest-holes, gloating. They are full of envy and malice, editors are.

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. This is no time to be flitting about the earth. I must cease from the activities proper to youth and begin to take on the dignities and gravities and inertia proper to that season of honorable senility which is on its way.

The only way to keep your health is to eat what you don't want, drink what you don't like, and do what you'd rather not.

The waves most washed me off the raft sometimes, but I hadn't any clothes on, and didn't mind.

The choir always tittered and whispered all through the service. There was once a church choir that was not ill-bred, but I have forgotten where it was.