“It is always a mistake to be plain-spoken.”

I like a thing simple but it must be simple through complication. Everything must come into your scheme, otherwise you cannot achieve real simplicity.

One does not get better but different and older and that is always a pleasure.

Nothing is more interesting than that something that you eat.

Forensics is eloquence and reduction.

You are brilliant and subtle if you come from Iowa and really strange and you live as you live and you are always very well taken care of if you come from Iowa.

I am I because my little dog knows me.

Nothing could bother me more than the way a thing goes dead once it has been said.

This joy you feel is life.

Every day is a renewal, every morning the daily miracle. This joy you feel is life.

Let me listen to me and not to them.

There is too much fathering going on just now and there is no doubt about it fathers are depressing.

Anything one does every day is important and imposing and anywhere one lives is interesting and beautiful.

Nothing has happened today except kindness.

There ain’t no answer. There ain’t gonna be any answer. There never has been an answer. That’s the answer.

You’ll be old and you never lived, and you kind of feel silly to lie down and die and to never have lived, to have been a job chaser and never have lived.

Ladies there is no neutral position for us to assume.

I can write about prayer, you can read about prayer, but sooner or later you have to fall to your knees and just plain pray. Then, and only then, will you begin to operate in the vein of God’s miracle-working ways.

[The play] is like to be a very conceited scurvy one, in plain English.

You run risks. That’s the plain truth. You run risks and, even in the most unlikely places, you are subject to destiny’s whims.

Would I describe a preacher, I would express him simple, grave, sincere; In doctrine uncorrupt; in language plain, And plain in manner; decent, solemn, chaste,

Every time we hit an air pocket and the plane dropped about five hundred feet (leaving my stomach in my mouth)

Art doesn’t transform. It just plain forms.

Works of imagination should be written in very plain language; the more purely imaginative they are the more necessary it is to be plain.

They must be resolved on the highest plane of national interest if our course is to prove sound and our future protected. I trust, therefore, that you will do me the justice of receiving that which I have to say as solely expressing the considered viewpoint of a fellow American.