I don’t want everyone to like me; I should think less of myself if some people did.
Writing is not primarily escape, but use.
It is difficult to speak adequately or justly of London. It is not a pleasant place; it is not agreeable, or cheerful, or easy, or exempt from reproach. It is only magnificent.
To believe in a child is to believe in the Future.
I have only to let myself go! So I have said all my life, yet I have never fully done it.
Art is a point of view, and a genius way of looking at things.
Art derives a considerable part of its beneficial exercise from flying in the face of presumptions.
The historian, essentially, wants more documents than he can really use; the dramatist only wants more liberties than he can really take.
All intimacies are based on differences.
If we pretend to respect the artist at all we must allow him his freedom of choice, in the face, in particular cases, of innumerable presumptions that the choice will not fructify.
The artist beholds in nature more than she herself Nature is conscious of.
England always seems to me like a man swimming with his clothes on his head.
Kidd, turn off the light to spare my blushes.
She had her own way of doing all that she did, and this is the simplest description of a character which, although by no means without liberal motions, rarely succeeded in giving an impression of suavity.
Innocent and infinite are the pleasures of observation.
Oxford lends sweetness to labour and dignity to leisure.
To read between the lines was easier than to follow the text.
Experience was to be taken as showing that one might get a five-pound note as one got a light for a cigarette; but one had to check the friendly impulse to ask for it in the same way.
It doesn’t matter what you do in particular, so long as you have had your life.
I don’t care anything about reasons, but I know what I like.