Writers kid themselves-about themselves and other people. Take the talk about writing methods. Writing is just work-there’s no secret. If you dictate or use a pen or type with your toes-it is just work.
What is love? It is the morning and the evening star.
Under a tyranny, most friends are a liability. One quarter of them turn “reasonable” and become your enemies, one quarter are afraid to speak, and one quarter are killed and you die with them. But the blessed final quarter keep you alive.
We’d get sick on too many cookies, but ever so much sicker on no cookies at all.
Every man is a king so long as he has someone to look down on.
Writers have a rare power not given to anyone else: we can bore people long after we are dead.
When audiences come to see us authors lecture, it is largely in the hope that we’ll be funnier to look at than to read.
Advertising is a valuable economic factor because it is the cheapest way of selling goods, particularly if the goods are worthless.
It isn’t what you earn but how spend it that fixes your class.
NOW is a fact that cannot be dodged.
It is, I think, an error to believe that there is any need of religion to make life seem worth living.
People will buy anything that is one to a customer.
Cure the evils of Democracy by the evils of Fascism! Funny therapeutics! I’ve heard of their curing syphilis by giving the patient malaria, but I’ve never heard of their curing malaria by giving the patient syphilis.
The one thing that can be more disconcerting than intelligent hatred is demanding love.
When you think that most of us are doomed by divine grace to roast in hell, to say nothing of mortgages and hail and bad crops and extravagant womenfolks, ’tain’t any laughing matter!
Indians, of course, have no “theology,” and indeed no word for the system of credulity in which the white priests arrange for God, who must be entirely bewildered by it, a series of excuses for his failures.
There are so many people in the world who are eager to do for you things that you do not wish done, provided only that you will do for them things that you don’t wish to do.
Since dictating the Bible, and hiring a perfect race of ministers to explain it, God has never done much but creep around and try to catch us disobeying it.
Vast is the power of cities to reclaim the wanderer.
The greatest mystery about a human being is not his reaction to sex or praise, but the manner in which he contrives to put in twenty-four hours a day. It is this which puzzles the longshoreman about the clerk, the Londoner about the bushman.