I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child.... My hemmings and hawings over the telephone cause long-distance callers to switch from their native English to pathetic French. At parties, if I attempt to entertain people with a good story, I have to go back to every other sentence for oral erasures and inserts.... In these circumstances nobody should ask me to submit to an interview if by "interview" a chat between two normal human beings is implied.

Poor Knight! he really had two periods, the firsta dull man writing broken English, the seconda broken man writing dull English.

I am not, and never was, and never could have been, a brutal scoundrel.

Nothing is more exhilarating than philistine vulgarity.

...for the human brain can become the best torture house of all those it has invented, established and used in a millions of years, in millions of lands, on millions of howling creatures.

There are aphorisms that, like airplanes, stay up only while they are in motion.

Nothing revives the past so completely as a smell that was once associated with it.