“Books had instant replay long before televised sports.”

Life is supposed to be a series of peaks and valleys. The secret is to keep the valleys from becoming Grand Canyons.

An extravagance is something that your spirit thinks is a necessity.

Unsolicited advice is the junk mail of life.

You are mature when you know what is foolhardy and what is courage.

There is no psychiatrist in the world like a puppy licking your face.

What a strange world this would be if we all had the same sense of humor.

September tries its best to have us forget summer.

Few things are as democratic as a snowstorm.

Few things move as quietly as the future.

We must escape our illusions of correctness to understand the actions and beliefs of others.

The day the Lord created hope was probably the same day he created Spring.

We may pass violets looking for roses. We may pass contentment looking for victory.

If we try and fail, we have temporary disappointments. But if we do not try at all, we have permanent regrets.

The average man will bristle if you say his father was dishonest, but he will brag a little if he discovers that his great-grandfather was a Pirate.

Americans are optimists. They hope they’ll be wealthy someday – and they’re positive they can get one more brushful of paint out of an empty can.

Talent is a flame. Genius is a fire.

Writing long books is a laborious and impoverishing act of foolishness: expanding in five hundred pages an idea that could be perfectly explained in a few minutes. A better procedure is to pretend that those books already exist and to offer a summary, a commentary.

My problem is that people have been writing books about me.A lot of things that people write about you are incorrect, but you don’t fight about it.

I have somewhere seen it observed that we should make the same use of a book that the bee does of a flower: she steals sweets from it, but does not injure it.

Together, we can make ourselves a nation that spends more on books than on bombs, more on hospitals than the terrible tools of war, more on decent houses than military aircraft.

I don’t normally have time to read, so when I go away I like to take a few books.

When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap – people shouldn’t read that stuff.

The Devil writes down our sins – our Guardian Angel all our merits. Labor that the Guardian Angel’s book may be full, and the Devil’s empty.

I will say I am the sum of my books.