The piano may do for love-sick girls who lace themselves to skeletons, and lunch on chalk, pickles and slate pencils, but give me the banjo.

Among other common lies, we have the silent lie - the deception which one conveys by simply keeping still and concealing the truth. Many obstinate truth-mongers indulge in this dissipation, imagining that if they speak no lie, they lie not at all.

God, so atrocious in the Old Testament, so attractive in the New--the Jekyl and Hyde of sacred romance.

More than once I have been humiliated by my resemblance to God the father; He is always longing for the love of His children and trying to get it on the cheapest and laziest terms He can invent.

I have witnessed and greatly enjoyed the first act of everything which Wagner created, but the effect on me has always been so powerful that one act was quite sufficient; whenever I have witnessed two acts I have gone away physically exhausted; and whenever I have ventured an entire opera the result has been the next thing to suicide.

There is a great difference between feeding parties to wild beasts and stirring up their finer feelings in an inquisition. One is the system of degraded barbarians, the other of enlightened civilized people.

It's so damned humiliating.