I have thought many times since that if poets when they get discouraged would blow their brains out, they could write very much better when they got well.
No man has an appreciation so various that his judgment is good upon all varieties of literary work.
It is a wise child that knows its own father, and an unusual one that unreservedly approves of him.
I conceive that the right way to write a story for boys is to write so that it will not only interest boys but strongly interest any man who has ever been a boy. That immensely enlarges the audience.
It is no use to keep private information which you can’t show off.
Well, my book is written-let it go. But if it were only to write over again there wouldn’t be so many things left out. They burn in me; and they keep multiplying; but now they can’t ever be said. And besides, they would require a library-and a pen warmed up in hell.
Anybody can have ideas-the difficulty is to express them without squandering a quire of paper on an idea that ought to be reduced to one glittering paragraph.
I never write “metropolis” for seven cents when I can write “city” and get paid the same.
Figures don’t lie, but liars figure.
A railroad is like a lie you have to keep building it to make it stand.
I played Chess with him and would have beaten him sometimes only he always took back his last move, and ran the game out differently.
He could charm an audience an hour on a stretch without ever getting rid of an idea.
The Germans are exceedingly fond of Rhine wines; they are put up in tall, slender bottles, and are considered a pleasant beverage. One tells them from vinegar by the label.
Indecency, vulgarity, obscenity – these are strictly confined to man; he invented them. Among the higher animals there is no trace of them. They hide nothing. They are not ashamed.
The waves most washed me off the raft sometimes, but I hadn’t any clothes on, and didn’t mind.
The convention missionaries call “modesty” has no standard, and cannot have one, because it is opposed to nature and reason and is therefore an artificiality and subject to anybody’s whim – anybody’s diseased caprice.
Creed and opinion change with time, and their symbols perish; but Literature and its temples are sacred to all creeds and inviolate.
A man can be a Christian or a patriot, but he can’t legally be a Christian and a patriot – except in the usual way: one of the two with the mouth, the other with the heart.
Well – Patriotism has its laws. And it also is a perfectly definite one, there are not vaguenesses about it. It commands that the brother over the border shall be sharply watched and brought to book every time he does us a hurt or offends us with an insult.
I respect a man who knows how to spell a word more than one way.