«There was an old Man who said, `Hush! / I perceive a young bird in this bush!' / When they said, `Is it small?' / He replied, `Not at all!/ It is four times as big as the bush!'»

«Life begins at 40 - but so do fallen arches, rheumatism, faulty eyesight, and the tendency to tell a story to the same person, three or four times.»

«Photography is truth. And cinema is truth twenty-four times a second.»

«I once loved this game. But after being traded four times, I realized that it's nothing but a business. I treat my horses better than the owners treat us. It's a shame they've destroyed my love for the game.»

«I think I've probably re-invented myself three or four times now, if that's what one calls it.»

«And I sent messengers unto them, saying, I am doing a great work, so that I cannot come down: why should the work cease, whilst I leave it, and come down to you? / Yet they sent unto me four times after this sort; and I answered them after the same manner.»

«Thrice is he armed that hath his quarrel just, and four times he who gets his fist in fust»

«And that's how the book grew. That is, I wrote that same story four times. None of them were right, but I had anguished so much that I could not throw any of it away and start over, so I printed it in the four sections. That was not a deliberate tour de force at all, the book just grew that way. That I was still trying to tell one story which moved me very much and each time I failed, but I had put so much anguish into it that I couldn't throw it away, like the mother that had four bad children, that she would have been better off if they all had been eliminated, But she couldn't relinquish any of them. And that's the reason I have the most tenderness for that book, because it failed four times.»