Every writer knows the terror of an unexpected success. How to carry on? How to repeat it?

the theater is the only money-making business I know in which haste apparently rules from first to last.

... Washington was not only an important capital. It was a city of fear. Below that glittering and delightful surface there is another story, that of underpaid Government clerks, men and women holding desperately to work that some political pull may at any moment take from them. A city of men in office and clutching that office, and a city of struggle which the country never suspects.

There is something shameful about the death of a play. It does not die with pity, but contempt.

It takes a good many years and some pretty hard knocks to make people tolerant.

A cat and a Bible, and nobody needs to be lonely.

[On fishing:] Greatest rest in the world for the brain.