The worst thing you can do to a man is to tell him he can have what he wants.

A man's house burns down. The smoking wreckage represents only a ruined home that was dear through years of use and pleasant associations. By and by, as the days and weeks go on, first he misses this, then that, then the other thing. And when he casts about for it he finds that it was in that house. Always it is an essential - here was but one of its kind. It cannot be replaced. It was in that house. It is irrevocably lost...It will be years before the tale of lost essentials is complete, and not till then can he truly know the magnitude of his disaster.

I haven't any right to criticize books, and I don't do it except when I hate them. I often want to criticize Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can't conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I have to stop every time I begin. Every time I read Pride and Prejudice I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone.

All kings is mostly rapscallions, as fur as I can make out.

This is the year 1492. I am eighty-two years of age. The things I am going to tell you are things which I saw myself as a child and as a youth.

Our consciences take no notice of pain inflicted on others until it reaches a point where it gives pain to us.

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.