Routine is the death to heroism.

I laughed derisively. "For goodness' sake, don't start gargling now. This is serious." "I was laughing." "Oh, were you? Well, I'm glad to see you taking it in this merry spirit." "Derisively," I explained.

As we grow older and realize more clearly the limitations of human happiness, we come to see that the only real and abiding pleasure in life is to give pleasure to other people.

I believe there are two ways of writing novels. One is mine, making a sort of musical comedy without music and ignoring real life altogether; the other is going right deep down into life and not caring a damn.

I don't want to wrong anybody, so I won't go so far as to say that she actually wrote poetry, but her conversation, to my mind, was of a nature calculated to excite the liveliest of suspicions. Well, I mean to say, when a girl suddenly asks you out of a blue sky if you don't sometimes feel that the stars are God's daisy-chain, you begin to think a bit.

A girl who bonnets a policeman with an ashcan full of bottles is obviously good wife-and-mother timber.

We do not tell old friends beneath our roof-tree that they are an offence to the eyesight.