To kill a human being is, after all, the least injury you can do him.
Art is nothing more than the shadow of humanity.
London doesn’t love the latent or the lurking, has neither time, nor taste, nor sense for anything less discernible than the red flag in front of the steam-roller. It wants cash over the counter and letters ten feet high.
We are divided of course between liking to feel the past strange and liking to feel it familiar.
People can be in general pretty well trusted, of course – with the clock of their freedom ticking as loud as it seems to do here – to keep an eye on the fleeting hour.
Most English talk is a quadrille in a sentry-box.
I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of an artistic process.
A tradition is kept alive only by something being added to it.
If I should certainly say to a novice, ‘Write from experience and experience only,’ I should feel that this was rather a tantalizing monition if I were not careful immediately to add, ‘Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost.’
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.