There is no pain equal to that which two lovers can inflict on one another. This should be made clear to all who contemplate such a union. The avoidance of this pain is the beginning of wisdom, for it is strong enough to contaminate the rest of our lives.
The artist one day falls through a hole in the brambles, and from that moment he is following the dark rapids of an underground river which may sometimes flow so near to the surface that the laughing picnic parties are heard above.
Slums may well be breeding grounds of crime, but middle class suburbs are incubators of apathy and delirium.
Those of us who were brought up as Christians and have lost our faith have retained the sense of sin without the saving belief in redemption. This poisons our thought and so paralyses us in action.
When young we are faithful to individuals, when older we grow loyal to situations and to types.
The true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and no other task is of any consequence.
Civilization is maintained by a very few people in a small number of places and we need only some bombs and a few prisons to blot it out altogether.
Classical and romantic: private language of a family quarrel, a dead dispute over the distribution of emphasis between man and nature.
The past is the only dead thing that smells sweet.
A lazy person, whatever the talents with which he set out, will have condemned himself to second-hand thoughts and to second-rate friends.
There is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall.
Whom the gods wish to destroy they first call promising.
Words today are like the shells and rope of seaweed which a child brings home glistening from the beach and which in an hour have lost their luster.
Life is a maze in which we take the wrong turning before we have learned to walk.
The river of truth is always splitting up into arms that reunite. Islanded between them, the inhabitants argue for a lifetime as to which is the mainstream.
The artist is a member of the leisured classes who cannot pay for his leisure.
No education is worth having that does not teach the lesson of concentration on a task, however unattractive. These lessons, if not learnt early, will be learnt, if at all, with pain and grief in later life.
It is a mistake to expect good work from expatriates for it is not what they do that matters but what they are not doing.
Marriage is the permanent conversation between two people who talk over everything and everyone until death breaks the record.
Beautiful women must think about their beauty as capitalists think about their investments or politicians about their majorities; it is all they have to insure their places in the world.