Mothers, of course, are all right. They pay a chap's bills and don't bother him. But fathers bother a chap and never pay his bills.

The best way to appreciate your job is to imagine yourself without one.

Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.

Always forgive your enemies nothing annoys them so much.

It is better to have a permanent income than to be fascinating.

Everyone may not be good, but there's always something good in everyone. Never judge anyone shortly because every saint has a past and every sinner has a future.

To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.

Be yourself; everyone else is taken.

Women are made to be loved, not understood.

Some cause happiness wherever they go; others, whenever they go.

I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying.

I don't keep any close friends. I don't keep any secrets. I don't need friends. I just tell everybody everything, that's all.

Almost any garden, if you see it at just the right moment, can be confused with paradise.

You can't bluff someone that's not paying attention.

The third guy was different. He was what you got when you ate squirrels for four generations. Smarter than a rat and tougher than a goat, and jumpier than either one.

You missed World Hist." "Did you get notes for me?" "No. I thought you were dead in a ditch.

Misery is manifold. The wretchedness of the earth is multiform.

Life is a perpetual instruction in cause and effect.

A couple of times he called the second he'd finished reading a novel and just had to tell me about it, and I know it sounds hokey and librarianish to say so, but I just swooned when he did that.

The Civil War defined us as what we are and it opened us to being what we became, good and bad things... It was the crossroads of our being, and it was a hell of a crossroads.

There are no innocents. There are, however, different degrees of responsibility.