“If you can’t write a story that pleases yourself, you will never please the public. But in writing the story forget the public.”

O all who give and receive gifts, such as they are wisest. Everywhere they are wisest. They are the magi.

Write what you like; there is no other rule.

Inject a few raisins of conversation into the tasteless dough of existence.

What is the world at its best but a little round field of the moving pictures with two walking together in it?

If a person has lived through war, poverty and love, he has lived a full life.

The true adventurer goes forth aimless and uncalculating to meet and greet unknown fate.

Now, girls, if you want to observe a young man hustle out after a pick and shovel, just tell him that your heart is in some other fellow’s grave. Young men are grave-robbers by nature.

Bride knoweth bride at the glance of an eye. And between them swiftly passes comfort and meaning in a language that man and widows wot not of.

There is this difference between the grief of youth and that of old age; youth’s burden is lightened by as much of it as another shares; old age may give and give, but the sorrow remains the same.

I’ve got some of my best yarns from park benches, lamp posts and newspaper stands.

This fair but pitiless city of Manhattan was without a soul its inhabitants were manikins moved by wires and springs.

He studied cities as women study their reflections.

There is one day that is ours. Thanksgiving Day is the one day that is purely American.

You can’t appreciate home till you’ve left it, money till it’s spent, your wife till she’s joined a woman’s club, nor Old Glory till you see it hanging on a broomstick on the shanty of a consul in a foreign town.

Each of us, when our day’s work is done, must seek our ideal, whether it be love or pinochle or lobster à la Newburg, or the sweet silence of the musty bookshelves.

History is bright and fiction dull with homely men who have charmed women.