California is an Italy without its art.
Cleverness becomes a public nuisance.
Just to let you know that the buffet car will be closing for stocktaking in five minutes. The next station stop is Chesterfield.
When I see a spade, I call it a spade. I’m glad to say I have never seen a spade. The man who would call a spade a spade should be compelled to use it. It’s the only thing he’s fit for.
George Moore leads his readers to the latrine and locks them in.
When I had to fill in my immigration papers, I gave my age as 19, and my profession as genius; I added that I had nothing to declare except my talent.
Men as a rule love with their eyes, women with their ears.
If it is not nailed to the floor, it’s mine. If I can pry it loose, it is not nailed down.
Life is like a box of terrible analogies...
There is one thing worse than an absolutely loveless marriage: a marriage in which there is love, but on one side only.
Poets know how useful passion is for publication. Nowadays a broken heart will run to many editions.
What the hell is an oboe?
People may fail many times, but they become failures only when they begin to blame someone else. Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much.
Don’t be discouraged if your children reject your advice. Years later they will offer it to their own offspring.
All authority is quite degrading. It degrades those who exercise it, and it degrades those over whom it is exercised.
Give children beauty, not the record of bloody slaughters and barbarous brawls, as they call history, or of the latitude and longitude of places nobody cares to visit, as they call geography.
The ages live in history through their anachronisms.
The only thing that the artist cannot see is the obvious. The only thing that the public can see is the obvious...
Public opinion exists only where there are no ideas.
Greek dress was in its essence inartistic. Nothing should reveal the body but the body.