“If their occupation is actual work they prefer to pump water into cisterns,two of which leak through holes in the bottom and one ofwhich is water-tight. A, of course, has the good one;”

“A half truth, like half a brick, is always more forcible as an argument than a whole one. It carries better.”

“I am a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work, the more I have of it”

“A sportsman is a man who, every now and then, simply has to go out and kill something.”

“I detest life-insurance agents: they always argue that I shall some day die, which is not so.”

“Writing is no trouble: you just jot down ideas as they occur to you. The jotting is simplicity itself--it is the occurring which is difficult.”

“The writing of solid, instructive stuff fortified by facts and figures is easy enough. There is no trouble in writing a scientific treatise on the folk-lore of Central China, or a statistical enquiry into the declining population of Prince Edward Island. But to write something out of one's own mind, worth reading for its own sake, is an arduous contrivance only to be achieved in fortunate moments, few and far in between. Personally, I would sooner have written Alice in Wonderland than the whole Encyclopedia Britannica.”