Literature and Words

Start it at no particular time of your life; wander at your free will all over your life; talk only about the thing which interests you for the moment; drop it the moment its interest threatens to pale.

High and fine literature is wine, and mine is only water; but everybody likes water.

A successful book is not made of what is in it, but what is left out of it .

Books are the liberated spirits of men.

Eloquence is the essential thing in a speech, not information.

Whenever we come upon one of those intensely right words in a book or a newspaper the resulting effect is physical as well as spiritual, and electrically prompt.

Never argue with people who buy ink by the gallon.

When a library expels a book of mine and leaves an unexpurgated Bible lying around where unprotected youth and age can get hold of it, the deep unconscious irony of it delights me and doesn't anger me.

Don't explain your author, read him right and he explains himself.

Truth is more of a stranger than fiction.

Humor must not professedly teach and it must not professedly preach, but it must do both if it would live forever.

The pause - that impressive silence, that eloquent silence, that geometrically progressive silence which often achieves a desired effect where no combination of words, howsoever felicitous, could accomplish it.

Definite speech means clarity of mind.

The difference between fiction and nonfiction is that fiction must be absolutely believable.

Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.

Literature is well enough, as a time-passer, and for the improvement and general elevation and purification of mankind, but it has no practical value.

Wit is the sudden marriage of ideas which before their union were not perceived to have any relation .

Words are only painted fire; a look is the fire itself.

Sometimes my feelings are so hot that I have to take the pen and put them out on paper to keep them from setting me afire inside; then all that ink and labor are wasted because I can't print the results

To get the right word in the right place is a rare achievement.

The unspoken word is capital. We can invest it or we can squander it.

Don't look at the world with your hands in your pockets. To write about it you have to reach out and touch it .

Many a small thing has been made large by the right kind of advertising.

A public library is the most enduring of memorials, the trustiest monument for the preservation of an event or a name or an affection; for it, and it only, is respected by wars and revolutions, and survives them.