One’s favorite book is as elusive as one’s favorite pudding.
There are occasions when I would rather feel like a fly than a spider.
How few writers can prostitute all their powers!
The people I respect most behave as if they were immortal and as if society was eternal. Both assumptions are false: both of them must be accepted as true if we are to go on eating and working and loving, and are to keep open a few breathing holes for the human spirit.
What the world most needs today are negative virtues – not minding people, not being huffy, touchy, irritable or revengeful.
I’m a holy man minus the holiness. Hand that on to your three spies, and tell them to put it in their pipes.
All this fame and money, which have so thrilled me when they came to others, leave me cold when they come to me. I am not an ascetic, but I don’t know what to do with them, and my daily life has never been so trying, and there is no one to fill it emotionally.
The hungry and the homeless don’t care about liberty any more than they care about cultural heritage. To pretend that they do care is cant.
Intuition attracts those who wish to be spiritual without any bother, because it promises a heaven where the intuitions of others can be ignored.
Humility is a quality for which I have only a limited admiration. In many phases of life it is a great mistake and degenerates into defensiveness or hypocrisy.
All that is observable in a man-that is to say his actions and such of his spiritual existence as can be deduced from his actions-falls into the domain of history.
It is the function of the novelist to reveal the hidden life at its source: to tell us more about Queen Victoria than could be known, and thus to produce a character who is not the Queen Victoria of history.
We are all like Scheherazade’s husband, in that we want to know what happens next.
It is pleasant to be transferred from an office where one is afraid of a sergeant-major into an office where one can intimidate generals, and perhaps this is why history is so attractive to the more timid among us. We can recover self-confidence by snubbing the dead.
But Humanity, in its desire for comfort, had over-reached itself. It had exploited the riches of nature too far. Quietly and complacently, it was sinking into decadence, and progress had come to mean the progress of the Machine.
Give, do not lend; after death who will thank you?
Riposte of “that old lady in the anecdote who was accused by her nieces of being illogical,” Logic! Good gracious! What rubbish! How can I tell what I think till I see what I say?
If only the sense of actuality can be lulled-and it sleeps for ever in most historians-there is no passion that cannot be gratified in the past.
People in a novel can be understood completely by the reader, if the novelist can be understood completely by the reader, if the novelist wishes; their inner as well as their outer life can be exposed.
Pathos, piety, courage, they exist, but are identical, and so is filth. Everything exists, nothing has value.