My main reason for adopting literature as a profession was that, as the author is never seen by his clients, he need not dress respectably.

A good listener is usually thinking about something else.

Carlyle said, "A lie cannot live"; it shows he did not know how to tell them.

I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.

Any ordinary man can...surround himself with two thousand books...and thenceforward have at least one place in the world in which it is possible to be happy.

No place affords a more striking conviction of the vanity of human hopes than a public library.

What you have when everyone wears the same playclothes for all occasions, is addressad by nickname, expected to participate in Show And Tell, and bullied out of any desire form privacy, is not democracy; it is kindergarten.

Women dress alike all over the world: they dress to be annoying to other women.

Alimony is a system by which, when two people make a mistake, one of them keeps paying for it.

I can think of nothing more boring for the American people than to have to sit in their living rooms for a whole half hour looking at my face on their television screens.