“There are two times in a man's life when he should not speculate: when he can't afford it, and when he can.”

“In a museum in Havana, there are two skulls of Christopher Columbus, one when he was a boy and one when he was a man”

“The fact is, the king was a good deal more than a king, he was a man; and when a man is a man, you can't knock it out of him.”

“Their very imagination was dead. When you can say that of a man he has struck bottom... there is no lower deep for him.”

“A man is never more truthful than when he acknowledges himself a liar.”

“There comes a time in every rightly constructed boy's life when he has a raging desire to go somewhere and dig for hidden treasure.”

“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.”