When love flies it is remembered not as love but as something else.
Expansion, that is the idea the novelist must cling to, not completion, not rounding off, but opening out.
You can transmute love, ignore it, muddle it, but you can never pull it out of you.
When love flies it is remembered not as love but as something else. Blessed are the uneducated, who forget it entirely, and are never conscious of folly or pruriency in the past, of long aimless conversations.
At the moment they vanished they were everywhere, the cool benediction of the night descended, the stars sparkled, and the whole universe was a hill.
Human beings have their great chance in the novel.
The armour of falsehood is subtly wrought out of darkness, and hides a man not only from others, but from his own soul.
She must be assured that it is not a criminal offense to love at first sight.
To make us feel small in the right way is a function of art; men can only make us feel small in the wrong way.
Creative writers are always greater than the causes that they represent.
What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote.
A poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself.
Love and understand the Italians, for the people are more marvellous than the land.
Charm, in most men and nearly all women, is a decoration.
I’m a holy man minus the holiness.
The people I respect most behave as if they were immortal and as if society was eternal.
Nonsense and beauty have close connections.
Death destroys a man, but the idea of death saves him.
Liking one person is an extra reason for liking another.
Think before you speak is criticism’s motto; speak before you think, creation’s.