“The four most beautiful words in our common language: I told you so.”

There’s a lot to be said for being nouveau riche, and the Reagans mean to say it all.

It is essential to naturalist doctrine that literature, to be good, must, finally, be the author’s experience worked out literally.

I think I have a normal threshold of anger, but it’s true that I am, by nature, belligerent.

The United States is a madhouse.

To a man, ornithologists are tall, slender, and bearded so that they can stand motionless for hours, imitating kindly trees, as they watch for birds.

We must declare ourselves, become known; allow the world to discover this subterranean life of ours which connects kings and farm boys, artists and clerks. Let them see that the important thing is not the object of love, but the emotion itself.

There is something about a bureaucrat that does not like a poem.

I can understand companionship.

I never wanted to be a writer. I mean, that’s the last thing I wanted.

I am a novelist turned temporary adventurer, and I chose to write television, movies and plays for much the same reason that Henry Morgan selected the Spanish Main for his peculiar – and not dissimilar – sphere of operations.

Certainly ‘The Judgment of Paris’ was the novel in which I found my own voice.

In classical times, it was a capital offense to speculate upon the hour of a king’s death or upon the identity of his successor.

Until the rise of American advertising, it never occurred to anyone anywhere in the world that the teenager was a captive in a hostile world of adults.

To invent a war means that you’ve become a wartime president, and you can suspend much if not all of the Bill of Rights.

It’s always best to stay out of other people’s divorces. And their civil wars.

For the record, I’m a Second World War veteran and served in the Pacific.

Music is a universal language.

I speak two languages, Body and English.

The transformation of silence into language and action is an act of self-revelation .

Music is the language of the spirit. It opens the secret of life bringing peace, abolishing strife.

It is very important that adults talk to children about what is happening in a way that they can understand, using simple and age-appropriate language.

By and large, language is a tool for concealing the truth.

To express oneself badly is not only faulty as far as the language goes, but does some harm to the soul.

The misuse of language induces evil in the soul.