They had furtive eyes and weak chins. There was no wickedness in them, but only pettiness and vulgarity.
When my obituary notice at last appears in The Times, and they say: ‘What, I thought he died years ago,’ my ghost will gently chuckle.
A scudding rain, just turning into sleet, swept the deck in angry gusts, like a nagging woman who cannot leave a subject alone.
Mrs. Strickland was plainly nervous. “Well, tell us your news,” she said. “I saw your husband. I’m afraid he’s quite made up his mind not to return.” I paused a little. “He wants to paint.
Thing I’ve always noticed, people don’t commit suicide for love, as you’d expect, that’s just a fancy of novelists; they commit suicide because they haven’t got any money.
We were staggered and immediately on the defensive, for she looked intellectual, and it made us feel shy.
To achieve great success in literature you must have a certain coarseness in your composition... Really to move and influence men you must have complete understanding, and you can only get that if you have in you something of the common clay of humanity.
I don’t enjoy your beauty any the less because I know how much it owes to the happy combination of perfect taste and ruthless determination.
What do the circumstances of your life matter if your dreams make you lord paramount of time and space.
But every well has a bottom and finally your friend will come to the end of what he has to tell you:.
One great difference between the persons of real life and the persons of fiction is that the persons of real life are creatures of impulse.
Love will be stronger and last longer if there are impediments to its gratification.
Don’t you think he may be pursuing an ideal that is hidden in a cloud of unknowing – like an astronomer looking for a star that only a mathematical calculation tells him exists?
The elect sneer at popularity; they are inclined even to assert that it is a proof of mediocrity;.
Did Beethoven create his symphonies for his glorification? I don’t believe it. I believe he created them because the music in his soul demanded expression and then all he tried to do was to make them as perfect as he knew how.
When a woman’s amorous advances are declined by a man she is apt to draw one or two conclusions; one is that he is homosexual and the other is that he is impotent.
I myself stand on one side and the rest of the world on the other. There is an abyss between, that no power can cross, a strange barrier more insuperable than a mountain of fire. Husband and wife know nothing of one another. However ardent their passion, however intimate their union, they are never one; they are scarcely more to one another than strangers.
And isn’t it wonderful that with those simple objects, with his painter’s exquisite sensibility, moved by the charity in his heart, that funny, dear old man should have made something so beautiful that it breaks you? It was as though, unconsciously perhaps, hardly knowing what he was doing, he wanted to show you that if you only have enough love, if you only have enough sympathy, out of pain and distress and unkindness, out of all the evil of the world, you can create beauty.
On his advice I read The Craft of Fiction by Mr. Percy Lubbock, from which I learned that the only way to write novels was like Henry James; after that I read Aspects of the Novel by Mr. E. M. Forster, from which I learned that the only way to write novels was like Mr. E. M. Forster; then I read The Structure of the Novel by Mr. Edwin Muir, from which I learned nothing at all.
I’m afraid it sounds very rude, but I hope from the bottom of my heart that I shall never set eyes on any of you again.