Winning children (who appear so guileless) are children who have discovered how effective charm and modesty and a delicately calculated spontaneity are in winning what they want.

Imprisonment of the body is bitter; imprisonment of the mind is worse

But there comes a time in everybody's life when he must decide whether he'll live among human beings or nota fool among fools or a fool alone.

Nature reserves the right to inflict upon her children the most terrifying jests.

The test of an adventure is that when you're in the middle of it, you say to yourself "Oh now I've got myself into an awful mess; I wish I were sitting quietly at home. And the sign that something's wrong with you is when you sit quietly at home wishing you were out having lots of adventure.

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.

I would love to be the poet laureate of Coney Island.