“Sixty minutes of thinking of any kind is bound to lead to confusion and unhappiness.”

I myself have known some profoundly thoughtful dogs.

When all things are equal, translucence in writing is more effective than transparency, just as glow is more revealing than glare.

The act of writing is either something the writer dreads or actually likes, and I actually like it. Even re-writing’s fun. You’re getting somewhere, whether it seems to move or not.

You can fool too many of the people too much of the time.

Nowadays men lead lives of noisy desperation.

For one thing, she pronounced flowers ‘flars’ and I couldn’t let it slide.

Love is what you’ve been through with somebody.

Let the meek inherit the earth — they have it coming to them.

I can feel a thing I cannot touch and touch a thing I cannot feel. The first is sad and sorry, the second is your heart.

I write humor the way a surgeon operates, because it is a livelihood, because I have a great urge to do it, because many interesting challenges are set up, and because I have the hope it may do some good.

She wasn’t much to look at but she was something to think about.

Where most of us end up there is no knowing, but the hellbent get where they are going.

With sixty staring me in the face, I have developed inflammation of the sentence structure and definite hardening of the paragraphs.

Art – the one achievement of man which has made the long trip up from all fours seem well advised

I have lived in the East for nearly thirty years now, but many of my books prove that I am never very far away from Ohio in my thoughts, and that the clocks that strike in my dreams are often the clocks of Columbus.

So much has already been written about everything that you can’t find out anything about it.

O jealousy! thou magnifier of trifles.

In the ideal State laws are few and simple, because they have been derived from certainties. In the corrupt State laws are many and confused, because they have been derived from uncertainties.

When I’m wrong it’s never meant for you, so don’t confuse my love with what I do.

I always want to confuse people in terms of any kind of image and be unpredictable in any kind of movie I make.

When a man’s knowledge is not in order, the more of it he has the greater will be his confusion.

Don’t confuse being stimulating with being blunt.

To write history is as important as to make history. It is an unchanging truth that if the writer does not remain true to the maker, then it takes on a quality that will confuse humanity.

They dared not peer down into their own natures, down into the feverish confusion that filled their minds with a kind of dense, acrid mist.