O. Henry Quotes

81 Sourced Quotes

If you can't write a story that pleases yourself, you will never please the public. But in writing the story forget the public.

O. Henry
Love and business and family and religion and art and patriotism are nothing but shadows of words when a man's starving!

O. Henry
You can't appreciate home till you've left it, money till it's spent, your wife till she's joined a women's club, nor Old Glory till you see it hanging on a broomstick on the shanty of a consul in a foreign town.

O. Henry
But how is it now? All we get is orders; and the laws go out of the state. Them legislators set up there at Austin and don't do nothing but makes laws against kerosene oil and schoolbooks being brought into the state. I reckon they was afraid some man would go home some evening after work and light up and get an education and go to work and make laws to repeal aforesaid laws.

O. Henry
There is no well-defined boundary between honesty and dishonesty. The frontiers of one blend with the outside limits of the other, and he who attempts to tread this dangerous ground may be sometimes in one domain and sometimes in the other.

O. Henry
We can't buy one minute of time with cash; if we could, rich people would live longer.

O. Henry
A good story is like a bitter pill, with the sugar coating inside of it.

O. Henry
It couldn't have happened anywhere but in little old New York.

O. Henry
You'd think New York people was all wise; but no, they can't get a chance to learn. Every thing's too compressed. Even the hay-seeds are bailed hay-seeds. But what else can you expect from a town that's shut off for the world by the ocean on one side and New Jersey on the other?

O. Henry
What a woman wants is what you're out of. She wants more of a thing when it's scarce.

O. Henry
Whenever my patient begins to count the carriages in her funeral procession I subtract 50 per cent from the curative power of medicines.

O. Henry
This fair but pitiless city of Manhattan was without a soul... its inhabitants were manikins moved by wires and springs.

O. Henry
Each of us, when our day's work is done, must seek our ideal, whether it be love or pinochle or lobster à la Newburg, or the sweet silence of the musty bookshelves.

O. Henry
In time truth and science and nature will adapt themselves to art. Things will happen logically, and the villain be discomfited instead of being elected to the board of directors. But in the meantime fiction must not only be divorced from fact, but must pay alimony and be awarded custody of the press despatches.

O. Henry
A straw vote, says I, only shows which way the hot air blows.

O. Henry
Humans were denied the speech of animals. The only common ground of communication upon which dogs and men can get together is in fiction.

O. Henry
In the Big City a man will disappear with the suddenness and completeness of the flame of a candle that is blown out.

O. Henry
If you live in an atmosphere of luxury, luxury is yours whether your money pays for it, or another's.

O. Henry
Yes, I get dry spells. Sometimes I can't turn out a thing for three months. When one of those spells comes on I quit trying to work and go out and see something of life. You can't write a story that's got any life in it by sitting at a writing table and thinking. You've got to get out into the streets, into the crowds, talk with people, and feel the rush and throb of real life-that's the stimulant for a story writer.

O. Henry
Hospitality in the prairie country is not limited. Even if your enemy passes your way, you must feed him before you shoot him.

O. Henry
Broadway — the great sluice that washes out the dust of the gold-mines of Gotham.

O. Henry
Inject a few raisins of conversation into the tasteless dough of existence.

O. Henry
Take of London fog 30 parts; malaria 10 parts, gas leaks 20 parts, dewdrops gathered in a brickyard at sunrise 25 parts; odor of honeysuckle 15 parts. Mix. The mixture will give you an approximate conception of a Nashville drizzle.

O. Henry
There is this difference between the grief of youth and that of old age; youth's burden is lightened by as much of it as another shares; old age may give and give, but the sorrow remains the same.

O. Henry
She had become so thoroughly annealed into his life that she was like the air he breathed—necessary but scarcely noticed.

O. Henry