O. Henry on writing

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.

History is bright and fiction dull with homely men who have charmed women.

It ain’t the roads we take; it’s what’s inside of us that makes us turn out the way we do.

To write a good love letter, you ought to begin without knowing what you mean to say and to finish without knowing what you have written.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau1712–1778

• Love

Don’t use words too big for the subject. Don’t say ‘infinitely’ when you mean ‘very’; otherwise you’ll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite.

C. S. Lewis1898–1963

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

Benjamin Franklin1706–1790

• Reading