a good oyster cannot please the palate as acutely as a bad one can revolt it, and a good oyster cannot make him who eats it live for ever though a bad one can make him dead for ever.

The mind is its own enemy, that fights itself with the innumerable pliant and ineluctable arms of the octopus.

There are two kinds of imperialists - imperialists and bloody imperialists.

No one can write a best-seller by taking thought. The slightest touch of insincerity blurs its appeal. The writer who keeps his tongue in his cheek, who knows that he is writing for fools and that, therefore, he had better write like a fool, makes a respectable living out of serials and novelettes; but he will never make the vast, the blaring, half a million success. That comes of blended sincerity and vitality.

The main difference between men and women is that men are lunatics and women are idiots.

It would be no loss to the world if most of the writers now writing had been strangled at birth.

Writing has nothing to do with communication between person and person, only with communication between different parts of a person's mind.