Life is always a tightrope or a feather bed. Give me the tightrope.

I don't know if I should care for a man who made life easy; I should want someone who made it interesting.

I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally happens in such cases, each time it was a different story.

He had to deal all at once with the packed regrets and stifled memories of an inarticulate lifetime.

Habit is necessary; it is the habit of having habits, of turning a trail into a rut, that must be incessantly fought against if one is to remain alive.

True originality consists not in a new manner but in a new vision.

My little dog - a heartbeat at my feet.

Life is the only real counselor; wisdom unfiltered through personal experience does not become a part of the moral tissue.

Misfortune had made Lily supple instead of hardening her, and a pliable substance is less easy to break than a stiff one.

When people ask for time, it's always for time to say no. Yes has one more letter in it, but it doesn't take half as long to say.

A New York divorce is in itself a diploma of virtue.

Life is always a tightrope or a feather bed. Give me the tightrope.

The air of ideas is the only air worth breathing.

Another unsettling element in modern art is that common symptom of immaturity, the dread of doing what has been done before.

Beware of monotony; it's the mother of all the deadly sins.

There are moments when a man's imagination, so easily subdued to what it lives in, suddenly rises above its daily level and surveys the long windings of destiny.

The worst of doing one's duty was that it apparently unfitted one for doing anything else.

What's the use of making mysteries? It only makes people want to nose 'em out.

To be able to look life in the face: that's worth living in a garret for, isn't it?

If only we'd stop trying to be happy we'd have a pretty good time.

There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.

In any really good subject, one has only to probe deep enough to come to tears.

Silence may be as variously shaded as speech.

Old age, calm, expanded, broad with the haughty breadth of the universe, old age flowing free with the delicious near-by freedom of death.

The American landscape has no foreground and the American mind no background.

After all, one knows one's weak points so well, that it's rather bewildering to have the critics overlook them and invent others.

I have never known a novel that was good enough to be good in spite of its being adapted to the author's political views.

The only way not to think about money is to have a great deal of it.

If we'd stop trying to be happy we could have a pretty good time.

Believe me, all of you, the best way to help the places we live in is to be glad we live there.

The real alchemy consists in being able to turn gold back again into something else; and that's the secret that most of your friends have lost.

Art is on the side of the oppressed. Think before you shudder at the simplistic dictum and its heretical definition of the freedom of art. For if art is freedom of the spirit, how can it exist within the oppressors?

If only wed stop trying to be happy we could have a pretty good time.

They seemed to suddenly come upon happiness as if they had surprised a butterfly in a winter wood.

Habit is necessary it is the habit of having habits of turning a trail into a rut that must be incessantly fought against if one is to remain alive.

There is one friend in the life of each of us who seems not a separate person however dear and beloved but an expansion an interpretation of ones self the very meaning of ones soul.

There are two ways of spreading light to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.

The only thing to do is to hug ones friends tight and do ones job.

No insect hangs its nest on threads as frail as those which will sustain the weight of human vanity.

People pay for what they do, and still more, for what they have allowed themselves to become. And they pay for it simply: by the lives they lead.

There are two ways of spreading light; to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.

To visit Morocco is still like turning the pages of some illuminated Persian manuscript all embroidered with bright shapes and subtle lines.

One of the first obligations of art is to make all useful things beautiful.

True originality consists not in a new manner but in a new vision

There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle, or the mirror that reflects it.

One of the great things about travel is you find out how many good, kind people there are.

It was harder to drown at sunrise than in darkness.

Traditions that have lost their meaning are the hardest of all to destroy.

There are two ways of spreading light - to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.