Winter is the time for comfort, for good food and warmth, for the touch of a friendly hand and for a talk beside the fire: it is the time for home.
I am not eccentric. It’s just that I am more alive than most people. I am an unpopular electric eel set in a pond of catfish.
Eccentricity is not, as some would believe, a form of madness. It is often a kind of innocent pride, and the man of genius and the aristocrat are frequently regarded as eccentrics because genius and aristocrat are entirely unafraid of and uninfluenced by the opinions and vagaries of the crowd.
I am patient with stupidity but not with those who are proud of it.
My personal hobbies are reading, listening to music, and silence.
If certain critics and poetasters had their way, ‘Ordinary Piety’ and its child, Dullness, would be the masters of poetry.
I am one of those unhappy persons who inspire bores to the greatest flights of art.
Vulgarity is, in reality, nothing but a modern, chic, pert descendant of the goddess Dullness.
The child and the great artist – these alone receive the sensation fresh as it was at the beginning of the world.
All great art contains an element of the irrational.
The aim of flattery is to soothe and encourage us by assuring us of the truth of an opinion we have already formed about ourselves.
There is no truth. Only points of view.
Rhythm is one of the principal translators between dream and reality.
One’s own surroundings means so much to one, when one is feeling miserable.
I wish the government would put a tax on pianos for the incompetent.
A great many people now reading and writing would be better employed keeping rabbits.
Virginia Woolf’s writing is no more than glamorous knitting. I believe she must have a pattern somewhere.
Good taste is the worst vice ever invented.