I have always been delighted at the prospect of a new day, a fresh try, one more start, with perhaps a bit of magic waiting somewhere behind the morning.
The more we elaborate our means of communication, the less we communicate.
To resent and remember brings strife; to forgive and forget brings peace.
To show a child what once delighted you, to find the child’s delight added to your own – this is happiness.
It is good fiction, so largely ignored now, that brings us so much closer to the real facts.
Living in an age of advertisement, we are perpetually disillusioned. The perfect life is spread before us every day, but it changes and withers at a touch.
To multiply your joy, count your blessings.
Write as often as possible, not with the idea at once of getting into print, but as if you were learning an instrument.
If we openly declare what is wrong with us, what is our deepest need, then perhaps the death and despair will by degrees disappear.
To say that these men paid their shillings to watch twenty-two hirelings kick a ball is merely to say that a violin is wood and catgut, that Hamlet is so much paper and ink.
We cannot get grace from gadgets.
Man, the creature who knows he must die, who has dreams larger than his destiny, who is forever working a confidence trick on himself, needs an ally. Mine has been tobacco.
We plan, we toil, we suffer – in the hope of what? A camel-load of idol’s eyes? The title deeds of Radio City? The empire of Asia? A trip to the moon? No, no, no, no. Simply to wake just in time to smell coffee and bacon and eggs.
The real lost souls don’t wear their hair long and play guitars. They have crew cuts and trained minds, sign on for research in biological warfare, and don’t give their parents a moment’s worry.
If you are a genius, you’ll make your own rules, but if not – and the odds are against it – go to your desk no matter what your mood, face the icy challenge of the paper – write.
There was no respect for youth when I was young, and now that I am old, there is no respect for age, I missed it coming and going.
The most lasting reputation I have is for an almost ferocious aggressiveness, when in fact I am amiable, indulgent, affectionate, shy and rather timid at heart.
Those no-sooner-have-I-touched-the-pillow people are past my comprehension. There is something bovine about them.
The first fall of snow is not only an event, it is a magical event. You go to bed in one kind of a world and wake up in another quite different, and if this is not enchantment then where is it to be found?
A lot of men who have accepted – or had imposed upon them in boyhood – the old English public school styles of careful modesty in speech, with much understatement, have behind their masks an appalling and impregnable conceit of themselves.