I haven't much opinion of words. They're apt to set fire to a dry tongue, that's what I say.

Women like to sit down with trouble - as if it were knitting.

Nothing in life is so hard that you can't make it easier by the way you take it.

No idea is so antiquated that it was not once modern. No idea is so modern that it will not someday be antiquated.

There wouldn't be half as much fun in the world if it weren't for children and men, and there ain't a mite of difference between them under the skins.

He knows so little and knows it so fluently.

I waited and worked, and watched the inferior exalted for nearly thirty years; and when recognition came at last, it was too late to alter events, or to make a difference in living.

Nothing is more consuming, or more illogical, than the desire for remembrance.

To teach one's self is to be forced to learn twice.

Doesn't all experience crumble in the end to mere literary material?

A tragic irony of life is that we so often achieve success or financial independence after the chief reason for which we sought it has passed away.

Mediocrity would always win by force of numbers, but it would win only more mediocrity.

What happens is not as important as how you react to what happens.

All change is not growth, as all movement is not forward.

I haven't much opinion of words. They're apt to set fire to a dry tongue, that's what I say.

It is lovely, when I forget all birthdays, including my own, to find that somebody remembers me.

Women are one of the Almighty's enigmas to prove to men that He knows more than they do.

Violence commands both literature and life, and violence is always crude and distorted.

The only difference between a rut and a grave are the dimensions.

No life is so hard that you cannot make it easier by the way you take it.

No matter how vital experience might be while you lived it, no sooner was it ended and dead than it became as lifeless as the piles of dry dust in a school history book.

All change is not growth as all movement is not forward.

The older I grow the more earnestly I feel that the few joys of childhood are the best that life has to give.

Idealism, that gaudy coloring matter of passion, fades when it is brought beneath the trenchant white light of knowledge. Ideals, like mountains, are best at a distance.

A good novel cannot be too long nor a bad novel too short.

I am not authorized to fire substitute teachers.

Removing substantial fuel loads from our forests helps prevent catastrophic fire and better protects species, watersheds and neighboring communities that call them home.

A thought often makes us hotter than a fire.

Envy like fire always makes for the highest points.

A leaf fluttered in through the window this morning, as if supported by the rays of the sun, a bird settled on the fire escape, joy in the task of coffee, joy accompanied me as I walked.

From each one of them rose separate columns of smoke, meeting in a pall overhead, and through the smoke came stabbing flashes of fire as German shells burst with thudding shocks of sound. This was the front line of battle.

Not too much, though there's a certain amount of rancour and bitterness when someone tries to fire you.

I was at this casino minding my own business, and this guy came up to me and said, "You're gonna have to move, you're blocking a fire exit." As though if there was a fire, I wasn't gonna run. If you're flammible and have legs, you are never blocking a fire exit.

In all feats of fire-eating it should be noted that the head is thrown well back, so that the flame may pass out of the open mouth instead of up into the roof, as it would if the head were held naturally.

Wise anger is like fire from a flint: there is great ado to get it out; and when it does come, it is out again immediately.

The bourgeois prefers comfort to pleasure, convenience to liberty, and a pleasant temperature to the deathly inner consuming fire.

The best training is to play by ear: trial by fire.

Being thrown into the fire and getting the thing turned around in a hurry made it more difficult. Things have been done the hard way. I think you learn better when things are done the hard way.

Under pressure, people admit to murder, setting fire to the village church or robbing a bank, but never to being bores.

Man is a fire-stealing animal, and we can't help building machines and machine intelligences, even if, from time to time, we use them not only to outsmart ourselves but to bring us right up to the doorstep of Doom.

You can fire your secretary, divorce your spouse, abandon your children. But they remain your co-authors forever.

Life is the fire that burns and the sun that gives light. Life is the wind and the rain and the thunder in the sky. Life is matter and is earth, what is and what is not, and what beyond is in Eternity.

It's not a party until the fire department shows up.

It is your business when the wall next door catches fire.

It is your concern when your neighbor's wall is on fire.

You don't sit up in a cave and write the Great American Novel and know it is utterly superb, and then throw it page by page into the fire. You just don't do that. You send it out. You have to send it out.

Take to every Gallon of Honey, three Gallons of water, and put them both together, and set them over so soft a fire, that you may endure to melt and break the honey with your hands.

There's nothing wrong with the car except that it's on fire.

When it came to political power, blacks need not apply. Add to this steaming stew the growing tensions over the Vietnam War and the movement for civil rights, and you had plenty of elements to fire the imagination of a novice journalist.