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.
The “germ,” wherever gathered, has ever been for me, “the germ of a story,” and most of the stories strained to shape under my hand have sprung from a single small seed, a seed as remote and windblown as a casual hint.
If I were to live my life over again, I would be an American. I would steep myself in America, I would know no other land.
To treat a big subject in the intensely summarized fashion demanded by an evening’s traffic of the stage when the evening, freely clipped at each end, is reduced to two hours and a half, is a feat of which the difficulty looms large.
I am blackly bored when they are at large and at work; but somehow I am still more blackly bored when they are shut up in Holloway and we are deprived of them.
An Englishman’s never so natural as when he’s holding his tongue.
We trust to novels to train us in the practice of great indignations and great generosity.
What is either a picture or a novel that is not character?
A solitary maple on a woodside flames in single scarlet, recalls nothing so much as the daughter of a noble house dressed for a fancy ball, with the whole family gathered around to admire her before she goes.
Sometimes she went so far as to wish that she should find herself in a difficult position, so that she might have the pleasure of being as heroic as the occasion demanded.
Her chief dread in life, at this period of her development, was that she would appear narrow minded; what she feared next afterwards was that she should be so.
She is written in a foreign tongue.