“What you are to do without me I cannot imagine.”

I do not know what I think until I write it.

Liquor is the chloroform which enables the poor man to endure the painful operation of living.

When a thing is funny, search it carefully for a hidden truth.

It is a curious sensation: the sort of pain that goes mercifully beyond our powers of feeling.

Criminals do not die by the hands of the law. They die by the hands of other men.

Democracy is a device that ensures we shall be governed no better than we deserve.

Whisky is liquid sunshine.

The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and all time.

The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.

We have no more right to consume happiness without producing it than to consume wealth without producing it.

The secret of being miserable is to have leisure to bother about whether you are happy or not.

If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance.

If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance.

The golden rule is that there are no golden rules.

Make it a rule never to give a child a book you would not read yourself.

There are two tragedies in life. One is to lose your heart’s desire. The other is to gain it.

Imagination, on the contrary, which is ever wandering beyond the bounds of truth, joined to self-love and that self-confidence we are so apt to indulge, prompt us to draw conclusions which are not immediately derived from facts.

Purpose is when you know and understand what you were born to accomplish. Vision is when you see it in your mind and begin to imagine it

To write a song you must have an imagination, to have an imagination you must be free.

All good novelists have bad memories. What you remember comes out as journalism; what you forget goes into the compost of the imagination.

It’s a great comfort to some people to groan over their imaginary ills.

Creativity has much to do with experience, observation and imagination, and if any one of those key elements is missing, it doesn’t work.

Imagination alone is not enough, because the reality of nature is far more wondrous than anything we can imagine.

Now in reality, the world has paid too great a compliment to critics, and has imagined them to be men of much greater profundity than they really are.