If you wait for inspiration, you’re not a writer, but a waiter.
Dogma is invariably wrong, as knowledge is always in a state of transition.
But even the law cannot be in your bedroom at night.
I am somebody. I am me. And I don’t need anybody to make me somebody.
Historical novels are, without question, the best way of teaching history, for they offer the human stories behind the events and leave the reader with a desire to know more.
If you’re going to be a writer, the first essential is just to write. Do not wait for an idea. Start writing something and the ideas will come. You have to turn the faucet on before the water starts to flow.
You stick your finger in the water and you pull it out, and that is how much of a hole you leave when you’re gone.
The only way men or women can be judged is against the canvas of their own time.
Knowledge was not meant to be locked behind doors. It breathes best in the open air where all men can inhale its essence.
There is no man more dangerous than one who does not doubt his own rightness.
A true gentleman is at a disadvantage in dealing with women. Women are realists, and their tactics are realistic, so no man should be a gentleman where women are concerned unless the women are very, very old or very, very young. Women admire gentlemen, and sleep with cads.
When a man is one of a kind, he will be lonely wherever he is.
I really learned how to write from Robert Louis Stevenson, Anthony Trollope, and de Maupassant.
When you go to a country, you must learn how to say two things: how to ask for food, and to tell a woman that you love her. Of these the second is more important, for if you tell a woman you love her, she will certainly feed you.
A book is less important for what it says than for what it makes you think.
The saddle is a place for dreaming when there’s hours of trail ahead...
One never realizes how much and how little he knows until he starts talking.
There are shadows for the shadows of things, as a reflection seen in a mirror of a mirror. We know there are circles within circles and dimensions beyond dimension. Reality is itself a shadow, only an appearance accepted by those whose eyes shun what might lie beyond.
No matter how much I admire our schools, I know that no university exists that can provide an education; what a university can provide is an outline, to give the learner a direction and guidance. The rest one has to do for oneself.
A great book begins with an idea; a great life, with a determination.