One can always tell it's summer when one sees school teachers hanging about the streets idly, looking like cannibals during a shortage of missionaries.

The division between art and deviousness and crime is sometimes as thin as a cigarette paper.

To ask an author who hopes to be a serious writer if his work is autobiographical is like asking a spider where he buys his thread. The spider gets his thread right out of his own guts, and that is where the author gets his writing.

What we call luck is the inner man externalized. We make things happen to us.

If you don't hurry up and let life know what you want, life will damned soon show you what you'll get.

As the tragic writer rids us of what is petty and ignoble in our nature, so also the humorist rids us of what is cautious, calculating, and priggish--about half of our social conscience, indeed. Both of them permit us, in blessed moments of revelation, to soar above the common level of our lives.

All mothers think their children are oaks, but the world never lacks for cabbages.