In short, you have only your emotions to sell. This is the experience of all writers.
Cut out all these exclamation jokes. An explanation point is like laughing at your own joke. I’m going to delete you from my contacts if you keep sending solely emoji texts. You’re a grown-ass man.
Young people do not perceive at once that the giver of wounds is the enemy and the quoted tattle merely the arrow.
I talk with the authority of failure – Ernest with the authority of success. We could never sit across the same table again.
There was even a recurrent idea in America about an education that would leave out history and the past, that should be a sort of equipment for aerial adventure, weighed down by none of the stowaways of inheritance or tradition.
Once I thought that Lake Forest was the most glamorous place in the world. Maybe it was.
Once a change of direction has begun, even though it’s the wrong one, it still tends to clothe itself as thoroughly in the appurtenances of rightness as if it had been a natural all along.
A lot of young girls together is a romantic secret thing like the first sight of wild ducks at dawn.
Marriage was created not to be a background but to need one. Mine is going to be outstanding. It can’t, shan’t be the setting – it’s going to be the performance, the lively, lovely, glamorous performance, and the world shall be the scenery.
I never blame failure – there are too many complicated situations in life – but I am absolutely merciless toward lack of effort.
The best of America drifts to Paris. The American in Paris is the best American.
It’s Never too late, or in my case too early, to be whoever you want to be.
The history of my life is the history of the struggle between an overwhelming urge to write and a combination of circumstances bent on keeping me from it.
To be kind is more important than to be right. Many times, what people need is not a brilliant mind that speaks but a special heart that listens.
The ability to hold two competing thoughts in one’s mind and still be able to function is the mark of a superior mind.
Laughter is easier minute by minute, spilled with prodigality, tipped out at a cheerful word.
Let’s borrow life preservers and jump over. I think we should do something spectacular. I feel that all our lives have been too restrained.
Every author ought to write every book as if he were going to be beheaded the day he finished it.
Englishmen must have an island.
I want to tell you about your heart – you’ve probably been neglecting your heart – and you don’t know.