No man can be fully efficient if he expects praise or appreciation for what he does.

Adventure is the point where you toss your life on the scales of chance and wait for the pointer to stop.

Facts are facts! And if they're impossible, they're still facts!

It was a symptom of the insanity of human beings in a cosmos obviously designed for them to live in, but which they industriously prepare to make unlivable.

Children and barbarians have clear ideas of justice due to them, but no idea at all of justice due from them.

The most difficult of enterprises is to secure the cooperation of others in enterprises those others did not think of first.

I've never noticed that being nonsensical keeps things from happening. Don't you ever read about politics?

It isn't illegal to buy an artist's work for peanuts and sell it again at any price one can get. But it is an outrage!

The secret of getting along with people is that of postponing quarrels.

He had a stellar talent. I not only lost a contemporary in the death of Robert E. Howard. The world lost a writer of extraordinary gifts.

There is never a rational reason for a man to rejoice that a certain pretty girl exists and that he has found her. The experience, however, is universal.

I write to shed my sacred sorrows.

Of all affairs, communication is the most wonderful.

Every kind of love, it seems, is the only one. It doesn’t happen twice. And I never expected that you could have a broken heart and love with it too, so much that it doesn’t seem broken at all.

For all the hardship, I was still excited to be on the trail, testing my endurance, feeling especially alive as strength and fatigue flowed alternately through my limbs.

I don't know, people take chances on stage. It's a big free speech zone, a comedy show. So sometimes things happen, you say things that are a little bit off the edge.

If I gave up writing, I'd have to find an equally obsessive way to fill my time. Yarn-bombing skyscrapers or making houses out of empty soda bottles.

If there are amazing graces on this earth, I believe that they are these good children sent to us by God and not yet soiled by the knowledge that their nation does not love them.

Humor is when the joke's on you but hits the other fellow first -- before it boomerangs.

We are here to repair the world. I grew up thinking that was what everybody was trying to do.

Nothing can be more puritanical in application than the virtues.