A big man has no time really to do anything but just sit and be big. A great social success is a pretty girl who plays her cards as carefully as if she were plain. Action is character. Advertising is a racket, like the movies and the brokerage business. You cannot be honest without admitting [...]

A broken heart is a very pleasant complaint for a man in London if he has a comfortable income. A fashion is nothing but an induced epidemic. A fool’s brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence University education. A gentleman is one who puts more into the world than [...]

A man can be destroyed but not defeated. A man’s got to take a lot of punishment to write a really funny book. A serious writer is not to be confounded with a solemn writer. A serious writer may be a hawk or a buzzard or even a popinjay, but a solemn writer is always [...]

A bank is a place where they lend you an umbrella in fair weather and ask for it back when it begins to rain. A civilized society is one which tolerates eccentricity to the point of doubtful sanity. A diplomat is a man who always remembers a woman’s birthday but never remembers her age. A [...]

All the world is full of suffering. It is also full of overcoming. Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much. Although the world is full of suffering, it is also full of the overcoming of it. As selfishness and complaint pervert the mind, so love with its joy clears and [...]

A minute of perfection was worth the effort. A moment was the most you could ever expect from perfection. All God does is watch us and kill us when we get boring. We must never, ever be boring. Did perpetual happiness in the Garden of Eden maybe get so boring that eating the apple was [...]

Be brave. Take risks. Nothing can substitute experience. Beauty is the greatest seducer of man. Every blessing ignored becomes a curse. Everything that happens once can never happen again. But everything that happens twice will surely happen a third time. If you start by promising what you don’t even have yet, you’ll lose your desire [...]

A typical agent in New York gets 400 query letters a month. Of those, they might ask to read 3-4 manuscripts, and of those, they might ask to represent 1. Above all, a query letter is a sales pitch and it is the single most important page an unpublished writer will ever write. It’s the [...]

A strong argument for the religion of Christ is this – that offences against Charity are about the only ones which men on their death-beds can be made – not to understand – but to feel – as crime. All religion, my friend, is simply evolved out of fraud, fear, greed, imagination, and poetry. All [...]

Achievement brings its own anticlimax. All great achievements require time. All men are prepared to accomplish the incredible if their ideals are threatened. Any book that helps a child to form a habit of reading, to make reading one of his deep and continuing needs, is good for him. As far as I knew white [...]