“Many public-school children seem to know only two dates—1492 and 4th of July; and as a rule they don't know what happened on either occasion.”

“What gets us into trouble is not what we don't know. It's what we know for sure that just ain't so.”

“The most interesting information come from children, for they tell all they know and then stop.”

“The trouble with the world is not that people know too little; it's that they know so many things that just aren't so. ”

“A man who is not born with the novel-writing gift has a troublesome time of it when he tries to build a novel. I know this from experience. He has no clear idea of his story; in fact he has no story. He merely has some people in his mind, and an incident or two, also a locality, and he trusts he can plunge those people into those incidents with interesting results. So he goes to work. To write a novel? No--that is a thought which comes later; in the beginning he is only proposing to tell a little tale, a very little tale, a six-page tale. But as it is a tale which he is not acquainted with, and can only find out what it is by listening as it goes along telling itself, it is more than apt to go on and on and on till it spreads itself into a book. I know about this, because it has happened to me so many times.”

“Love seems the swiftest, but it is the slowest of all growths. No man or woman really knows what perfect love is until they have been married a quarter of a century.”

“I don't know anything that mars a good literature so completely as too much truth. Facts contain a great deal of poetry, but you can't use too many of them without damaging your literature.”