The English may not always be the best writers in the world, but they are incomparably the best dull writers.

The most durable thing in writing is style, and style is the most valuable investment a writer can make with his time. It pays off slowly, your agent will sneer at it, your publisher will misunderstand it, and it will take people you have never heard of to convince them by slow degrees that the writer who puts his individual mark on the way he writes will always pay off.

Great critics, of whom there are piteously few, build a home for the truth.

All language begins with speech, and the speech of common men at that, but when it develops to the point of becoming a literary medium it only looks like speech.

I'm all done with hating you. It's all washed out of me. I hate people hard, but I don't hate them very long.

The minute you try to talk business with him he takes the attitude that he is a gentleman and a scholar, and the moment you try to approach him on the level of his moral integrity he starts to talk business.

I knew one thing: as soon as anyone said you didn't need a gun, you'd better take one along that worked.