there comes a time when ambition ceases to burn, or romance to stir, and the highest cry of the human heart is for peace.

That is the tragedy of growing old, Chris. You don't leave the world. It leaves you.

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

Love sees clearly, and seeing, loves on. But infatuation is blind; when it gains sight, it dies.

there is something shameful about the death of a play. It does not die with pity, but contempt. A book may fail, but who is there to know it? It dies and is buried, and is decently interred on the bookseller's shelf; but the play dies to laughter, to scorn and disdain.

I suppose there is something in all of us that harks back to the soil. When you come to think of it, what are picnics but outcroppings of instinct? No one really enjoys them or expects to enjoy them, but with the first warm days some prehistoric instinct takes us out into the woods, to fry potatoes over a strangling wood fire or spend the next week getting grass stains out of our clothes. It must be instinct; every atom of intelligence warns us to stay at home near the refrigerator.

[The writer] wants both to do the best possible work and also to reach the largest possible audience. The result is a fairly normal condition of discouragement.