His Quotes

Let's put it this way: if you are a novelist, I think you start out with a 20 word idea, and you work at it and you wind up with a 200,000 word novel. We, picture-book people, or at least I, start out with 200,000 words and I reduce it to 20.

I am not the only person who uses his computer mainly for the purpose of diddling with his computer.

The man who looks for security, even in the mind, is like a man who would chop off his limbs in order to have artificial ones which will give him no pain or trouble.

To state the facts frankly is not to despair the future nor indict the past. The prudent heir takes careful inventory of his legacies and gives a faithful accounting to those whom he owes an obligation of trust.

My uncle Sammy was an angry man. He had printed on his tombstone: What are you looking at?

Every man sees in his relatives, and especially in his cousins, a series of grotesque caricatures of himself.

A successful individual typically sets his next goal somewhat but not too much above his last achievement. In this way he steadily raises his level of aspiration.

The god whom science recognizes must be a God of universal laws exclusively, a God who does a wholesale, not a retail business. He cannot accommodate his processes to the convenience of individuals.

A man does not die of love or his liver or even of old age; he dies of being a man.

At his best, man is the noblest of all animals; separated from law and justice he is the worst.

When you control a man's thinking you do not have to worry about his actions.

While the mind is in doubt it is driven this way and that by a slight impulse.

A great number of the disappointments and mishaps of the troubled world are the direct result of literature and the allied arts. It is our belief that no human being who devotes his life and energy to the manufacture of fantasies can be anything but fundamentally inadequate.

He is winding the watch of his wit; by and by it will strike.

Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.

In every author let us distinguish the man from his works.

It is just like man's vanity and impertinence to call an animal dumb because it is dumb to his dull perceptions.

If a man does his best, what else is there?

A man is ethical only when life, as such, is sacred to him, that of plants and animals as that of his fellow men, and when he devotes himself helpfully to all life that is in need of help.

A man is usually more careful of his money than of his principles.

Criticism, like rain, should be gentle enough to nourish a man's growth without destroying his roots.

All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players: they have their exits and their entrances; and one man in his time plays many parts, his acts being seven ages.

No man is ever whipped until he quits in his own mind.

I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by conscious endeavor.

Between the daylight gambler and the player at night there is the same difference that lies between a careless husband and the lover swooning under his lady's window.

Never look down to test the ground before taking your next step; only he who keeps his eye fixed on the far horizon will find the right road.

I remember Michael dribbling at the top of the key. Everybody knew to just get the hell out of his way.

It is a light thing for whoever keeps his foot outside trouble to advise and counsel him that suffers.

Every man has inside himself a parasitic being who is acting not at all to his advantage.

If a man walks in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer. But if he spends his days as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making the earth bald before her time, he is deemed an industrious and enterprising citizen.