It has amazed me that the most incongruous traits should exist in the same person and, for all that, yield a plausible harmony.
Art, unless it leads to right action, is no more than the opium of an intelligentsia.
The ideas for stories that thronged my brain would not let me rest till I had got rid of them by writing them.
Art, if it is to be reckoned as one of the great values of life, must teach man humility, tolerance, wisdom and magnanimity. The value of art is not beauty, but right action.
Writing is a wholetime job: no professional writer can afford only to write when he feels like it.
I am afraid of people with too much charm. They devour you. In the end you are made a sacrifice to the exercise of their fascinating gift and their insincerity.
Usage is the only test. I prefer a phrase that is easy and unaffected to a phrase that is grammatical.
Evil is a necessary part of the order of the universe.
It’s asking a great deal that things should appeal to your reason as well as your sense of the aesthetic. – Of Human Bondage.
A good rule for writers: do not explain overmuch.
No married man’s ever made up his mind until he’s heard what his wife has got to say about it.
What I’m trying to tell you is that there are men who are possessed by an urge so strong to do some particular thing that they can’t help themselves, they’ve got to do it. They’re prepared to sacrifice everything to satisfy their yearning.
I don’t know why it is that the religious never ascribe common sense to God.
No man in his heart is quite so cynical as a well-bred woman.
The author always loads his dice, but he must never let the reader see that he has done so, and by the manipulation of his plot, he can engage the reader’s attention so that he does not perceive the violence that has been done to him.
Common sense and nature will do a lot to make the pilgrimage of life not too difficult.
They say a woman always remembers her first lover with affection; but perhaps she does not always remember him.
Kant thought things, not because they were true, but because he was Kant.
It was like making a blunder at a party; there was nothing to do about it, it was dreadfully mortifying, but it showed a lack of sense to ascribe too much importance to it.
She was a fool and he knew it and because he loved her it had made no difference.