“I’ll give you the whole secret to short story writing. Here it is. Rule 1: Write stories that please yourself. There is no Rule 2.”

She had become so thoroughly annealed into his life that she was like the air he breathed–necessary but scarcely noticed.

Most wonderful of all are words, and how they make friends one with another.

Whenever my patient begins to count the carriages in her funeral procession I subtract 50 per cent from the curative power of medicines.

Life is made up of sobs, sniffles, and smiles, with sniffles predominating.

No friendship is an accident.

What else can you expect from a town thats shut off from the world by the ocean on one side and New Jersey on the other?

By rights you’re a king. If I was you, I’d call for a new deal.

A straw vote only shows which way the hot air blows.

East is East, and West is San Francisco, according to Californians. Californians are a race of people; they are not merely inhabitants of a State.

It gives men courage and ambition and the nerve for anything. It has the colour of gold, is clear as a glass and shines after dark as if the sunshine were still in it.

Women’s weapon, water-drops.

When one loves one’s Art no service seems too hard.

Love and business and family and religion and art and patriotism are nothing but shadows of words when a man’s starving!

The lonesomest thing in all the world is a soul when it is making ready to go on its mysterious, far journey.

It ain’t the roads we take; it’s what’s inside of us that makes us turn out the way we do.

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