The quality of what is said inevitably influences the way in which it is said, however inexperienced the writer.
There is absolutely no point in sitting down to write a book unless you feel that you must write that book, or else go mad, or die.
Love affairs are for emotional sprinters; the pleasures of love are for the emotional marathoners.
What we call luck is the inner man externalized. We make things happen to us.
Never harbor grudges; they sour your stomach and do no harm to anyone else.
One learns one’s mystery at the price of one’s innocence.
Every man is wise when attacked by a mad dog; fewer when pursued by a mad woman; only the wisest survive when attacked by a mad notion.
There is no nonsense so gross that society will not, at some time, make a doctrine of it and defend it with every weapon of communal stupidity.
To ask an author who hopes to be a serious writer if his work is autobiographical is like asking a spider where he buys his thread. The spider gets his thread right out of his own guts, and that is where the author gets his writing.
Imagination is a good horse to carry you over the ground – not a flying carpet to set you free from probability.
A happy childhood has spoiled many a promising life.
The young are often accused of exaggerating their troubles; they do so, very often, in the hope of making some impression upon the inertia and the immovability of the selfish old.
No people in the world can make you feel so small as the English.
The problem for a Paracelsian physician like me is that I see diseases as disguises in which people present me with their wretchedness.
All art is holy. Not that it is all long-faced and miserable; it can be wild and wooly. But if it transforms you, it is art. And it is holy.
It is in this matter that I fall foul of so many American writers on writing; they seem to think that writing is a confidence game by means of which the author cajoles a restless, dull-witted, shallow audience into hearing his point of view. Such an attitude is base, and can only beget base prose.
There is more to marriage than four bare legs under a blanket.
The nature of happiness is such that happiness retreats the more intensely you pursue it.
Aristocrats need not be rich, but they must be free, and in the modern world freedom grows rarer the more we prate about it.
Of course, fairies are all imported in North America. We have no native fairies. The Little People do not long survive importation unless they go to California and grow large and beautiful, but haven’t much flavour, like the fruit and the film stars.