Unpopularity is a excellent salve to the conscience; it is delicious to be misunderstood.

There are, broadly speaking, two kinds of workers in the world, the people who do all the work, and the people who think they do all the work. The latter class is generally the busiest, the former never have time to be busy.

The moment of cocoa-drinking was always the moment of confidences.

Americans were people who wanted to leave every place better than they found it, to leave every man more of a man than they found him. ... Americans could open doors to almost all that was admirable - it was their misfortune, not their fault, that movies and victrolas and advertisements squeezed in when they opened the door.

always there is a sort of dream of air between you and the hills of California, a veil of unreality in the intervening air. It gives the hills the bloom that peaches have, or grapes in the dew.

Family jokes, though rightly cursed by strangers, are the bond that keeps most families alive.

Sometimes I pose, but sometimes I pose as posing.