“English usage is sometimes more than mere taste, judgment and education – sometimes it’s sheer luck, like getting across the street.”

By helping you, perhaps I was trying to lift up my life a trifle. Heaven knows anyone’s life can stand a little of that.

Prejudice is a great time saver. You can form opinions without having to get the facts.

Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time.

I have noticed that most men when they enter a barber shop and must wait their turn, drop into a chair and pick up a magazine. I simply sit down and pick up the thread of my sea wanderings, which began more than fifty years ago and is not quite ended.

I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.

The so-called science of poll-taking is not a science at all but mere necromancy. People are unpredictable by nature, and although you can take a nation’s pulse, you can’t be sure that the nation hasn’t just run up a flight of stairs.

One of the most time-consuming things is to have an enemy.

Oh, I never look under the hood.

A writer should concern himself with whatever absorbs his fancy, stirs his heart, and unlimbers his typewriter. … A writer has the duty to be good, not lousy: true, not false; lively, not dull; accurate, not full of error. He should tend to lift people up, not lower them down.

There is nothing more likely to start disagreement among people or countries than an agreement.

I’ve got a new friend, all right. But what a gamble friendship is! Charlotte is fierce, brutal, scheming, bloodthirsty-everything I don’t like. How can I learn to like her, even though she is pretty and, of course, clever?

We should all do what, in the long run, gives us joy, even if it is only picking grapes or sorting the laundry.

Creation is in part merely the business of forgoing the great and small distractions.

Stuart rose from the ditch, climbed into his car, and started up the road that led toward the north…As he peeked ahead into the great land that stretched before him, the way seemed long. But the sky was bright, and he somehow felt he was headed in the right direction.

A despot doesn’t fear eloquent writers preaching freedom- he fears a drunken poet who may crack a joke that will take hold.

The world is full of people who have never, since childhood, met an open doorway with an open mind.

The most beautiful words in the English language are ‘not guilty’.

Philistinism! – We have not the expression in English. Perhaps we have not the word because we have so much of the thing.

Say, has some wet bird-haunted English lawn Lent it the music of its trees at dawn?

Whoa, lady, I only speak two languages, English and bad English.

Speaking English is like tongue-twist for me. I can speak each word perfect, but then you have to string them together like, ‘Blah, blah, blah.’ That’s when I get crazy.

In the past when I was in Hollywood, I was like a dog. I felt humiliated. My English was not good. People would even ask me ‘Jackie Who?’.

So many Indian novels, quite unfairly, do not get the prominence they should because they have been written in a language other than English.

The English follow the principle that when one lies, one should lie big, and stick to it. They keep up their lies, even at the risk of looking ridiculous.