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

Leadership is for those who love the public good and are endowed and trained to administer it.

The best thing about animals is they don't talk much.

The dead don't stay interested in us living people for very long. Gradually, gradually, they let go hold of the earth . . . and the ambitions they had . . . and the things they suffered . . . and the people they loved. They get weaned away from the earth - that's the way I put it - weaned away.

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.

A convention is an agreed-upon falsehood, a permitted lie.

Many plays - certainly mine - are like blank checks. The actors and directors put their own signatures on them.