I'll give you the sole secret of short-story writing, and here it is: Rule 1. Write stories that please yourself. There is no rule 2. The technical points you can get from Bliss Perry. If you can't write a story that pleases yourself, you will never please the public. But in writing the story forget the public.

He studied cities as women study their reflections.

If man knew how women pass the time when they are alone, they'd never marry.

O all who give and receive gifts, such as they are wisest. Everywhere they are wisest. They are the magi.

If you can't write a story that pleases yourself, you will never please the public. But in writing the story forget the public.

Be always decent and right in your home town; and when you're on the road, never take more than four glasses of beer a day or play higher than a twenty-five-cent limit.

She plucked from my lapel the invisible strand of lint (the universal act of woman to proclaim ownership).