A good style should show no signs of effort. What is written should seem a happy accident.

The fact that a great many people believe something is no guarantee of its truth.

People do tell a writer things that they don't tell others. I don't know why, unless it is that having read one or two of his books they feel on peculiarly intimate terms with him; or it may be that they dramatize themselves and, seeing themselves as it were as characters in a novel, are ready to be as open with him as they imagine the characters of his invention are.

Advice to first year medical students: In anatomy, it is better to have learned and lost than never to have learned at all.

We didn't think much in the air corps of a fellow who wangled a cushy job out of his C.O. by buttering him up. It was hard for me to believe that God thought much of a man who tried to wangle salvation by fulsome flattery. I should have thought the worship most pleasing to him was to do your best according to your lights.

If people waited to know one another before they married, the world wouldn't be as overpopulated as it is now.

People who ask for your criticism want only praise.