When a literary person's exhaustive work is over, the last thing he wishes to do is to talk books.

I am convinced that there are times in everybody's experience when there is so much to be done, that the only way to do it is to sit down and do nothing.

What a pity when editors review a woman's book, that they so often fall into the error of reviewing the woman instead.

To her, the name of father was another name for love.

Our domestic Napoleons, too many of them, give flattery, bonnets and bracelets to women, and everything else but - justice.

O, girls! set your affections on cats, poodles, parrots or lap-dogs; but let matrimony alone. It's the hardest way on earth to getting a living.

There are no little things. "Little things," so called, are the hinges of the universe.

I am getting sick of people. I am falling in love with things. They hold their tongues.

Uncles and aunts, and cousins, are all very well, and fathers and mothers are not to be despised; but a grandmother, at holiday time, is worth them all.

The term 'lady' has been so misused, that I like better the old-fashioned term, woman.

I hate the word proper. If you tell me a thing is not proper, I immediately feel the most rabid desire to go 'neck and heels' into it.

Honesty is always the best policy, even when it's not the trend.

There is no whit less enlightenment under the tree by your street than there was under the Buddha's bo tree. I invite you to go sit under that tree by your street.

There are no laws for the novel. There never have been, nor can there ever be.

I'm somebody that you should know.

I only scream and scratch when something's only 'really good' or 'good', I want to be great, or let's go home.

Oaths and curses are a proof of a most heroic courage, at least in appearance, which answers the same end.

A pie in the face is funny. Comedy gold.

My wife is - in the strictest sense - my sole companion, and I need no other. There is no vacancy in my mind any more than in my heart.

We always look at the margin of safety in the balance sheet and then worry about the business.

The faster you go, the more students you leave behind. It doesn't matter how much or how fast you teach. The true measure is how much students have learned.