you have to love life to have life, and you need to have life to love life

I am my own judge of what truths I shall tell. The truth can do just as much harm as a lie.

Life is an unbroken succession of false situations.

Everybody's talking about people breaking into houses but there are more people in the world who want to break out of houses.

The public for which masterpieces are intended is not of this earth.

We do not choose the day of our birth nor may we choose the day of our death, yet choice is the sovereign faculty of the mind.

Every writer is necessarily a critic - that is, each sentence is a skeleton accompanied by enormous activity of rejection; and each selection is governed by general principles concerning truth, force, beauty, and so on. The critic that is in every fabulist is like the iceberg - nine-tenths of him is under water.