Choosing not to read is like closing an open door to paradise

I simply can't resist a cat, particularly a purring one.

What a man sees in the human race is merely himself in the deep and honest privacy of his own heart. Byron despised the race because he despised himself. I feel as Byron did, and for the same reason.

I have achieved my seventy years in the usual way: by sticking strictly to a scheme of life which would kill anybody else... I will offer here, as a sound maxim, this: That we can't reach old age by another man's road.

I told that girl, in the kindest, gentlest way, that I could not consent to deliver judgment upon any one's manuscript, because an individual's verdict was worthless. It might underrate a work of high merit and lose it to the world, or it might overrate a trashy production and so open the way for its infliction upon the world. I said that the great public was the only tribunal competent to sit in judgment upon a literary effort, and therefore it must be best to lay it before that tribunal in the outset, since in the end it must stand or fall by that mighty court's decision any way.

My memory was never loaded with anything but blank cartridges.

When a man stands on the verge of seventy-two you know perfectly well that he never reached that place without knowing what this life is - heartbreaking bereavement.