Paul Gallico Quotations

No game in the world is as tidy and dramatically neat as baseball, with cause and effect, crime and punishment, motive and result, so cleanly defined.

If there is any larceny in a man, golf will bring it out.

Nobody's a natural. You work to get good and then work to get better. It's hard to stay on top.

Jack Dempsey was a picture book fighter. By all the sons of Mars, he looked the part. He had dark eyes, blue-black hair, and the most beautifully proportioned body ever seen in any ring. He had the wide but sharply sloping shoulders of the puncher, a slim waist, and fine, symmetrical legs. His weaving, shuffling style of approach was drama in itself and suggested the stalking of a jungle animal. He had a smoldering truculence on his face and hatred in his eyes.

Law is a mental hair shirt. He admits a great longing for financial independence from the routine of desk slavery.

You learn eventually that, while there are no villains, there are no heroes either. And until you make the final discovery that there are only human beings, who are therefore all the more fascinating, you are liable to miss something.

A cat doesn't linger over making it's desires felt.

No one can be as calculatedly rude as the British, which amazes Americans, who do not understand studied insult and can only offer abuse as a substitute.

It is the custom to sneer at the modern apartment-house, television, big-city Christmas, with its commercial taint . . . office parties, artificial . . . Christmas trees . . . but future generations in search of their lost Christmases may well remember its innocence; yes, and its beauty, too.

No one has ever been able to discover how they [cats] make this subtle sound, and what is more, no one ever will. It is a secret that has endured from the very beginning of the time of cats and will never be revealed.

If you like cats and have some, you get kittens; and if you like kittens and enjoy having them about, they grow up and you get more cats.

When two people loved each other they worked together always, two against the world, a little company. Joy was shared; trouble was split. You had an ally..

Hockey is a fast, body-contact game played by men with clubs in their hands and knives laced to their feet.

It is only when you open your veins and bleed onto the page a little that you establish contact with your reader. If you do not believe in the characters or the story you are doing at that moment with all your mind, strength, and will, if you don't feel joy and excitement while writing it, then you're wasting good white paper, even if it sells, because there are other ways in which a writer can bring in the rent money besides writing bad or phony stories.

One is always seeking the touchstone that will dissolve one's deficiencies as a person and as a craftsman. And one is always bumping up against the fact that there is none except hard work, concentration, and continued application.

Everything a cat is and does physically is to me beautiful, lovely, stimulating, soothing, attractive and an enchantment.

There is the little matter of disposal of droppings in which the cat is far ahead of its rivals. The dog is somehow thrilled by what he or any of his friends have produced, hates to leave it, adores smelling it, and sometimes eats it.

Kittens can happen to anyone.

The door opened and it was God himself who walked into the room, straight from the glittering throne, God dressed in a camel's hair polo coat and flat camel's hair cap.