“The only genius that’s worth anything is the genius for hard work.”

There’s one thing I’ve always known: You can let people suspect anything else about you, but you must never let them suspect you of knowing what you’re doing.

Marygreen did not change in sixteen years. It had changed little enough in the past two years.

Most people are so busy knocking themselves out trying to do everything they think they should, they never get around to do what they want to do.

Those places he had seen, she would never see; those fine things he had done, she would never do. But worst of all she would never see him again.

Charm is the ability to make someone else think that both of you are pretty wonderful.

There’s an old press-agents’ slogan that’s good advice: Don’t read your publicity – weigh it.

[Sex] is something big and cosmic. What else do we have? There’s only birth and death and the union of two people – and sex is the only one that happens to us more than once.

War makes strangers bedfellows.

there are only two ways to make a lot [of money] while you’re young: One is to entertain the public; and the other is to cheat it.

She was luxuriously tired and her muscles felt sore from the unaccustomed strain of riding astride.

If you had better sense you’d have learned by now that nothing thrives so well as wickedness

the end of anything is a relief. In every relationship, even the most valuable, there are certain unpleasant tensions – and the ending of it snaps those taut inner wires.

I think Americans love success – but hate the people who have it.

I guess experience is just learning at first hand the things you knew all along anyway.

They had stopped now and he gave a glance up at the sky, through the trees, as though to see how much time was left. Amber, watching him, was suddenly struck with panic.

Nothing had ever tasted so good as the cool golden ale she swallowed from a pewter tankard. She slept deeply that night and longer than she had intended.

If you can stare hard at your problems, they almost always shrink or disappear, because you almost always find a better way of dealing with them than if you don’t face them head on. The more difficult the problem, the more important it is that you stare at it and deal with it.

When you start in science, you are brainwashed into believing how careful you must be, and how difficult it is to discover things. There’s something that might be called the ‘graduate student syndrome’; graduate students hardly believe they can make a discovery.

He who interrupts the course of his spiritual exercises and prayer is like a man who allows a bird to escape from his hand; he can hardly catch it again.

It is not hard to obey when we love the one whom we obey.

I am a writer perhaps because I am not a talker. It has always been hard for me to say exactly what I mean in speech But if I have written a clumsiness, I may erase it.

When I started the business, I hardly went home. I became very driven about work and about my career.

If there are too many competitors, even if you’re the best it’s a lot harder to win.

Be kind to all and severe to thyself.