The art of writing is the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair.

If we grow old wisely, we lay aside the senseless forms and meaningless conventions of society and go back to a more primitive mode of social intercourse, picking our friends the way children do, - because we like them, - spending time enough with them to get some real good out of them.

It was the spirit of the workers that was dangerous. The tired, gray crowds ebbing and flowing perpetually into the mills had waked and opened their mouths to sing.

Gathering news in Russia was like mining coal with a hat pin.

We can always find noble reasons for what we want to do.

English audiences of working people are like an instrument that responds to the player. Thought ripples up and down them, and if in some heart the speaker strikes a dissonance there is a swift answer. Always the voice speaks from gallery or pit, the terrible voice which detaches itself in every English crowd, full of caustic wit, full of irony or, maybe, approval.

We all marry strangers. All men are strangers to all women.