Architects cannot teach nature anything.
A thing long expected takes the form of the unexpected when at last it comes.
When the end of the world comes, I want to be in Kentucky, because everything there happens 20 years after it happens anywhere else.
Sometimes my feelings are so hot that I have to take the pen and put them out on paper to keep them from setting me afire inside; then all that ink and labor are wasted because I can’t print the results.
Simplified spelling is all right, but, like chastity, you can carry it too far.
There is nothing to be learned from the second kick of a mule.
The easy part of being an artist is figuring out the message that everyone else is ready to hear. The hard part is waiting for the proper lull to make the announcement.
Great things can happen when you don’t care who gets the credit.
We can achieve what we can conceive and believe.
Books are the liberated spirits of men.
The difference between those that succeed and those that fail is, those that succeeded tried.
Benaras is older than history, older than tradition, older even than legend, and looks twice as old as all of them put together!
Every time you stop a school, you will have to build a jail.
Experience is an author’s most valuable asset; experience is the thing that puts the muscle and the breath and the warm blood into the book he writes.
The North thinks it knows how to make corn bread, but this is a gross superstition. Perhaps no bread in the world is quite as good as Southern corn bread, and perhaps no bread in the world is quite as bad as the Northern imitation of it.
All emotion is involuntary when genuine.
It has been said that a Scotchman has not seen the world until he has seen Edinburgh; and I think that I may say that an American has not seen the United States until he has seen Mardi Gras in New Orleans.
When you catch an adjective, kill it.
An Englishman is a person who does things because they have been done before. An American is a person who does things because they haven’t been done before.
When a library expels a book of mine and leaves an unexpurgated Bible lying around where unprotected youth and age can get hold of it, the deep unconscious irony of it delights me and doesn’t anger me.