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

No friendship is an accident.

Bohemia is nothing more than the little country in which you do not live. If you try to obtain citizenship in it, at once the court and retinue pack the royal archives and treasure and move away beyond the hills.

I never have time to read now. I did all my reading before I was twenty.

Write what you like; there is no other rule.

The people of the State of Texas consist principally of men, women, and children, with a sprinkling of cowboys. The weather is very good, thermometer rarely rising above 2,500 degrees in the shade and hardly ever below 212.

We may achieve climate, but weather is thrust upon us.

Turn up the lights. I don’t want to go home in the dark.

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

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

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

She plucked from my lapel the invisible strand of lint (the universal act of woman to proclaim ownership).

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

I have been called ‘The American De Maupassant.’ Well, I never wrote a filthy word in my life, and I don’t like to be compared to a filthy writer.

If men knew how women pass the time when they are alone, they’d never marry.

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

A good story is like a bitter pill, with the sugar coating inside of it.

Hospitality in the prairie country is not limited. Even if your enemy passes your way, you must feed him before you shoot him.

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.

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.

There is no well defined boundary line between honesty and dishonesty. The frontiers of one blend with the outside limits of the other, and he who attempts to tread this dangerous ground may be sometimes in the one domain and sometimes in the other.

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

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

Whenever he saw a dollar in another man‘s hands he took it as a personal grudge, if he couldn’t take it any other way.

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.

It is said that love makes the world go ’round – the announcement lacks verification. It’s wind from the dinner horn that does it.

It’ll be a great place if they ever finish it.

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

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

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