Nothing so needs reforming as other people's habits. Fanatics will never learn that, though it be written in letters of gold across the sky. It is the prohibition that makes anything precious.
I felt it was my duty to praise all of God's works with fervent enthusiasm. At the same time I killed flies in my house in a spirit of hatred, exasperation and contempt. My praise to God for all his works was dishonest, the act of killing the fly was honest.
Eventually, I sickened of people, myself included, who didn't think enough of themselves to make something of themselves- people who did only what they had to and never what they could have done. I learned from them the infected loneliness that comes at the end of every misspent day. I knew I could do better.
I have not professionally dealt in truth. Many when they come to die have spent all the truth that was in them, and enter the next world as paupers. I have saved up enough to make an astonishment there.
If you invent two or three people and turn them loose in your manuscript, something is bound to happen to them -- you can't help it; and then it will take you the rest of the book to get them out of the natural consequences of that occurrence, and so first thing you know, there's your book all finished up and never cost you an idea.
Life was a fairy-tale, then, it is a tragedy now. When I was 43 and John Hay 41 he said life was a tragedy after 40, and I disputed it. Three years ago he asked me to testify again: I counted my graves, and there was nothing for me to say. I am old; I recognize it but I don't realize it. I wonder if a person ever really ceases to feel young - I mean, for a whole day at a time.
Every man feels that his experience is unlike that of anybody else and therefore he should write it down-- he finds also that everybody else has thought and felt on some points precisely as he has done, and therefore he should write it down.
There is nothing in the world like a persuasive speech to fuddle the mental apparatus and upset the convictions and debauch the emotions of an audience not practiced in the tricks and delusions of oratory