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.
There is no fury like an ex-wife searching for a new lover.
The English language is like a broad river on whose bank a few patient anglers are sitting, while, higher up, the stream is being polluted by a string of refuse-barges tipping out their muck.
Green leaves on a dead tree is our epitaph-green leaves, dear reader, on a dead tree.
The only way for writers to meet is to share a quick peek over a common lamp-post.
Idleness is only a coarse name for my infinite capacity for living in the present.
Sheep with a nasty side.
A woman’s desire for revenge outlasts all her other emotions.
A great writer created a world of his own and his readers are proud to live in it. A lesser writer may entice them in for a moment, but soon he will watch them filing out.