None of us feels the true love of God till we realize how wicked we are. But you can't teach people that - they have to learn by experience.

The great advantage about telling the truth is that nobody ever believes it.

Trouble shared is trouble halved.

She always says, my lord, that facts are like cows. If you look them in the face hard enough they generally run away.

While time lasts there will always be a future, and that future will hold both good and evil, since the world is made to that mingled pattern.

Every time a man expects, as he says, his money to work for him, he is expecting other people to work for him.

There certainly does seem a possibility that the detective story will come to an end, simply because the public will have learnt all the tricks.

As I grow older and older, And totter toward the tomb, I find that I care less and less, Who goes to bed with whom.

Those who prefer their English sloppy have only themselves to thank if the advertisement writer uses his mastery of the vocabulary and syntax to mislead their weak minds.

A human being must have occupation, of he or she is not to become a nuisance to the world.

Lawyers enjoy a little mystery, you know. Why, if everybody came forward and told the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth straight out, we should all retire to the workhouse.

None of us feels the true love of God till we realize how wicked we are. But you can't teach people that - they have to learn by experience.

The only sin passion can commit is to be joyless.

I always have a quotation for everything - it saves original thinking.

Death seems to provide the minds of the Anglo-Saxon race with a greater fund of amusement than any other single subject.

Paradoxical as it may seem, to believe in youth is to look backward; to look forward we must believe in age.

If it were not for the war, this war would suit me down to the ground.

Very dangerous things, theories.

Those who make some other person their job... are dangerous.

Time and trouble will tame an advanced young woman, but an advanced old woman is uncontrollable by any earthly force.

I love you - I am at rest with you - I have come home.

The English language has a deceptive air of simplicity; so have some little frocks; but they are both not the kind of thing you can run up in half an hour with a machine.

A continual atmosphere of hectic passion is very trying if you haven't got any of your own.

There's nothing you can't prove if your outlook is only sufficiently limited.

Jesus Christ is the only God who has a date in history.

The dogma of the Incarnation is the most dramatic thing about Christianity and indeed the most dramatic thing that ever entered the mind of man but if you tell people so they stare at you in bewilderment.

Facts are like cows. If you look them in the face long enough they generally run away.

To know one's own limitations is the hallmark of competence.

He had the appeal of a very young dog of a very large breed -- a kind of amiable absurdity.

You learn from a conglomeration of the incredible past - whatever experience gotten in any way whatsoever.

I've danced one time in my life. It was the most mortifying experience I ever had.

The experience of life consists of the experience which the spirit has of itself in matter and as matter, in mind and as mind, in emotion, as emotion, etc.

My best film composing experience was with Elia Kazan.

Education is a private matter between the person and the world of knowledge and experience, and has little to do with school or college.

A novel should be an experience and convey an emotional truth rather than arguments.

By experience we find out a short way by a long wandering.

The experience of democracy is like the experience of life itself-always changing, infinite in its variety, sometimes turbulent and all the more valuable for having been tested by adversity.

Learning teacheth more in one year than experience in twenty.

Well, the hardest thing to do, as we know from our own experience on 9/11 is protect everything all the time.

The most important training, though, is to experience life as a writer, questioning everything, inventing multiple explanations for everything. If you do that, all the other things will come; if you don't, there's no hope for you.

When I reached adulthood, even now, I could afford to belong to a country club. But I could never belong to a private club because of my experience as a child, because it would isolate me from the whole of humanity.

No one I know of has ever had this experience-where you had to sit and wait and wait for a DNA test to come back just so you can write the last page of the book.

If you live long enough, you'll experience everything.

Actually I'd had a certain amount of experience in Europe in the inter-war period, as a banker, and I was also a member of the Board of Directors of the International Chamber of Commerce.

In the case of my book, I don't think it's really the coming-out gay novel that everyone really needed, even though it was received as such. The boy is too creepy, he betrays his teacher, the only adult man with whom he's enjoyed a sexual experience, etc.

Well, I go to the theater today, and its curtain - there is no curtain in this play; the lights go down and go up - and we start. And I live this character for two hours. There are only two of us in the play. And It's a complete experience.

Our job as writers and thinkers in the time is how to bring about the occasions that let people have that first-person experience - or the metaphoric experience that allows them to see human continuity as opposed to total threat, total willingness to do violence.

Experience is never limited, and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness, and catching every air-borne particle in its tissue.

In my fifty years of experience and memory, I have seen the most amazing increase in the standard of living of a people ever achieved anywhere in the world. This is why I am so sure that our system of free competition and industrial development is sound and must be preserved.