A genius can never expect to have a good time anywhere, if he is a genuine article, but America is about the last place in which life will be endurable at all for an inspired writer of any kind. – Samuel Butler
Any fool can tell the truth, but it requires a man of some sense to know how to lie well. – Samuel Butler
Everyone should keep a mental wastepaper basket, and the older he grows, the more things will he promptly consign to it. – Samuel Butler
Lying has a kind of respect and reverence with it. We pay a person the compliment of acknowledging his superiority whenever we lie to him. – Samuel Butler
Then your words of abuse today may turn into a universally valid principle of denigration, for words are magical formulae. They leave fingermarks behind on the brain, which in the twinkling of an eye becomes the footprints of history. One ought to watch one’s every word. – Franz Kafka, quoted by Gustav Janouch, Conversations with Kafka