Italy and London are the only places where I don’t feel to exist on sufferance.
A critic has no right to the narrowness which is the frequent prerogative of the creative artist.
If there is on earth a house with many mansions, it is the house of words.
I have no mystic faith in the people. I have in the individual.
In the novel we can know people perfectly, and, apart from the general pleasure of reading, we can find here a compensation for their dimness in life.
Tolerance is just a makeshift, suitable for an overcrowded and overheated planet. It carries on when love gives out, and love generally gives out as soon as we move away from our home and our friends.
It is never possible for a novelist to deny time inside the fabric of his novel: he must cling, however lightly, to the thread of his story, he must touch the interminable tapeworm, otherwise he becomes unintelligible, which, in his case, is a blunder.
Neanderthal man listened to stories, if one may judge by the shape of his skull.
Sex begins before adolescence, and survives sterility; it is indeed coeval with our lives, although at the mating age its effects are more obvious to Society.
Pity wraps the student of the past in an ambrosial cloud, and washes his limbs with eternal youth.
I have always found writing pleasant and don’t understand what people mean by ‘throes of creation.’
Live in fragments no longer. Only connect...
Personal relations are the important thing for ever and ever, and not this outer life of telegrams and anger.
Happiness in the ordinary sense is not what one needs in life, though one is right to aim at it. The true satisfaction is to come through, and see those whom one lives come through.
The most successful career must show a waste of strength that might have removed mountains, and the most unsuccessful is not that of the man who is taken unprepared, but of him who has prepared and is never taken.
It makes a difference doesn’t it, whether we fully fence ourselves in, or whether we are fenced out by the barriers of others?
Nature pulls one way and human nature another.
Are not beauty and delicacy the same?
Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its highest. Live in fragments no longer.
America is rather like life. You can usually find in it what you look for It will probably be interesting, and it is sure to be large.