We have long passed the Victorian Era when asterisks were followed after a certain interval by a baby.
Money is the string with which a sardonic destiny directs the motions of its puppets.
Let us develop the resources of our land, call forth its powers, build up its institutions, promote all its great interests, and see whether we also, in our day and generation, may not perform something worthy to be remembered.
Things were easier for the old novelists who saw people all of a piece. Speaking generally, their heroes were good through and through, their villains wholly bad.
Cronshaw stopped for a moment to drink. He had pondered for twenty years the problem whether he loved liquor because it made him talk or whether he loved conversation because it made him thirsty.
We can none of us step into the same river twice, but the river flows on and the other river we step into is cool and refreshing, too.
Art is triumphant when it can use convention as an instrument of its own purpose.
The most useful thing about a principle is that it can always be sacrificed to expediency.
Art for art’s sake makes no more sense than gin for gin’s sake.
There is no explanation for evil. It must be looked upon as a necessary part of the order of the universe. To ignore it is childish, to bewail it senseless.
It is an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those who have lost it.
It was such a lovely day I thought it a pity to get up.
Old age has its pleasures, which, though different, are not less than the pleasures of youth.
Make him laugh and he will think you a trivial fellow, but bore him in the right way and your reputation is assured.
Imagination grows by exercise.
In business sharp practice sometimes succeeds, but in art honesty is not only the best but the only policy.
I do not confer praise or blame: I accept. I am the measure of all things. I am the center of the world.
The first duty of a woman is to be pretty, the second is to be well-groomed, and the third is never to contradict.
Art is merely the refuge which the ingenious have invented, when they were supplied with food and women, to escape the tediousness of life.
You can never know enough about your characters.