The machine has several virtues... One may lean back in his chair and work it. It piles an awful stack of words on one page. It don't muss things or scatter ink blots around.
France has neither winter, nor summer, nor morals. France is miserable because it is filled with Frenchmen, and Frenchmen are miserable because they live in France.
The frankest and freest product of the human mind and heart is a love letter; the writer gets his limitless freedom of statement and expression from his sense that no stranger is going to see what he is writing.
That is the way of the scientist. He will spend thirty years in building up a mountain range of facts with the intent to prove a certain theory; then he is so happy with his achievement that as a rule he overlooks the main chief fact of all-that all his accumulation proves an entirely different thing.
I went to the circus, and loafed around the back side till the watchman went by, and then dived in under the tent. I had my twenty-dollar gold piece and some other money, but I reckoned I better save it.... I ain't opposed to spending money on circuses, when there ain't no other way, but there ain't no use in wasting it on them.
When I was fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have him around. When I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much he had learned in seven years. See what happens when you "know it all", at any stage of life? Farther down the track you may see clearly how certain personal opinions, held onto too tightly, could be fogging up the view, and providing incorrect insight. Prosperity is the best protector of principle.
The easy part of being an artist is figuring out the message that everyone else is ready to hear. The hard part is waiting for the proper lull to make the announcement.