I had a vision ... of being found on the pavement by some passerby, with a small punctuation mark ending my sentence of life.

To the bottle! In infancy, the milk bottle; in our prime, the wine bottle; in our dotage, the pill bottle.

Well, that was life. It was an old tree, and the old passed on. Probably they did not mind. There came a time when all sap ran slowly, and the peace of age with all things behind it merged easily into the peace of death. The difficult thing was to be young.

These are times of action. Men think and then act; sometimes, indeed, they simply act.

I have never learned to say 'gas' for gasoline. It seems to me as absurd as if I were to say 'but' for butter.

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

I found that my name signed to a check was even more welcome than when signed to a letter.