If you haven’t had your life what have you had?
God’s creature is one. He makes man, not men. His true creature is unitary and infinite, revealing himself, indeed, in every finite form, but compromised by none.
Every governmental institution has been a standing testimony to the harmonic destiny of society, a standing proof that the life of man is destined for peace and amity, instead of disorder and contention.
When you forget to eat, you know you’re alive.
The advantage, the luxury, as well as the torment and responsibility of the novelist, is that there is no limit to what he may attempt as an executant – no limit to his possible experiments, efforts, discoveries, successes.
Art without life is a poor affair.
It exhibits the effort of an essentially prosaic mind to lift itself, by a prolonged muscular strain, into poetry.
Really, universally, relations stop nowhere, and the exquisite problem of the artist is eternally but to draw, by a geometry of his own, the circle within which they shall happily appear to do so.
The black and merciless things that are behind the great possessions.
Of course you’re always at liberty to judge the critic. Judge people as critics, however, and you’ll condemn them all!
Women never dine alone. When they dine alone they don’t dine.
The fatal futility of Fact.
The time-honored bread-sauce of the happy ending.
He is the same old sausage, fizzing and sputtering in his own grease.
Love has nothing to do with good reasons.
Novelist-Citizen of Two Countries Interpreter of his Generation on both Sides of the Sea.
London is on the whole the most possible form of life.
There were several ways of understanding her: there was what she said, and there was what she meant, and there was something between the two, that was neither.
That accurst autobiographic form which puts a premium on the loose, the improvised, the cheap, and the easy.
His kiss was like white lightning, a flash that spread, and spread again, and stayed.