The clerisy are those who seek, and find, delight and enlargement of life in books. The clerisy are those for whom reading is a personal art.
And I say to you that if you bring curiosity to your work it will cease to be merely a job and become a door through which you enter the best that life has to give you.
No one needs a word processor if he has an efficient secretary.
Comparatively few people know what a million dollars actually is. To the majority it is a gaseous concept, swelling or decreasing as the occasion suggests.
As the tragic writer rids us of what is petty and ignoble in our nature, so also the humorist rids us of what is cautious, calculating, and priggish – about half of our social conscience, indeed. Both of them permit us, in blessed moments of revelation, to soar above the common level of our lives.
The art of the quoter is to know when to stop.
I came at last to a recognition of myself as, in part, a Tom Sawyer who wanted everything done according to the rules of romantic fiction, and complicated simple solutions with his absurd adolescent, book-born nonsense.
You never see what you want to see, forever playing to the gallery.
I still have trouble identifying grammatical structures by name, though I know them as matters of usage.
I just am a Canadian. It is not a thing which you can escape from. It is like having blue eyes.
Fiction is not photography, it’s oil painting.
The result of a single action may spread like the circles that expand when a stone is thrown into a pond, until they touch places and people unguessed at by the person who threw the stone...
To this day I am indulgent toward orchestras that are trying to lift themselves in the world, while critics are busy assuring them that they are not the Vienna Philharmonic and never will be.
No, it’s the musicians and I must say they are an accomplished bunch, but odd, as musicians tend to be. Is it the vibration from their instruments, do you suppose, working on the brain? All that fraught buzzing?
The pleasures of love are for those who are hopelessly addicted to another living creature.
The division between art and deviousness and crime is sometimes as thin as a cigarette paper.
Oh hearts! Nobody gets through life without a broken heart. The important thing is to break the heart so that when it mends it will be stronger than before.
Did you know that Puritanism went hand in hand with dirt, that Oliver Cromwell put a 100 per cent tax on soap and that the repeal of the soap tax was one of the most popular acts of Charles II at his Restoration?
It is a waste of time to dissipate one’s moral zeal in disapproving of royal persons who have mistresses.
In the end, it is upon the quality and commitment of individuals that all group movements depend.