Really the writer doesn't want success. . . . He knows he has a short span of life, that the day will come when he must pass through the wall of oblivion, and he wants to leave a scratch on that wall - Kilroy was here - that somebody a hundred, or a thousand years later will see.

Gratitude is a quality similar to electricity: it must be produced and discharged and used up in order to exist at all.

The artists who want to be writers, read the reviews; the artists who want to write, don't.

A gentleman accepts the responsibility of his actions and bears the burden of their consequences.

And when I think about that, I think that if nothing but being married will help a man, he's durn nigh hopeless.

A man. All men. He will pass up a hundred chances to do good for one chance to meddle where meddling is not wanted. He will overlook and fail to see chances, opportunities, for riches and fame and welldoing, and even sometimes for evil. But he won't fail to see a chance to meddle.

And even a liar can be scared into telling the truth, same as honest man can be tortured into telling a lie.