Habits in writing as in life are only useful if they are broken as soon as they cease to be advantageous.
The artist produces for the liberation of his soul. It is his nature to create as it is the nature of water to run down the hill.
I have an idea that the only thing which makes it possible to regard this world we live in without disgust is the beauty which now and then men create out of the chaos.
In the country the darkness of night is friendly and familiar, but in a city, with its blaze of lights, it is unnatural, hostile and menacing. It is like a monstrous vulture that hovers, biding its time.
If you want to eat well in England, eat three breakfasts.
You are not angry with people when you laugh at them. Humor teaches tolerance.
The crown of literature is poetry.
Perfection is a trifle dull. It is not the least of life’s ironies that this, which we all aim at, is better not quite achieved.
We know our friends by their defects rather than by their merits.
The great American novel has not only already been written, it has already been rejected.
Like all weak men he laid an exaggerated stress on not changing one’s mind.
Every production of an artist should be the expression of an adventure of his soul.
There are two good things in life – freedom of thought and freedom of action.
The moral I draw is that the writer should seek his reward in the pleasure of his work and in release from the burden of thought; and, indifferent to aught else, care nothing for praise or censure, failure or success.
No woman is worth more than a fiver unless you’re in love with her. Then she’s worth all she costs you.
Beauty is something wonderful and strange that the artist fashions out of the chaos of the world in the torment of his soul.
Now it is a funny thing about life. If you refuse to accept anything but the best, you very often get it. If you utterly decline to make do with what you can get, then somehow or other, you are very likely to get what you want.
The mystic sees the ineffable, and the psychopathologist the unspeakable.
A Unitarian very earnestly disbelieves what everyone else believes.
The Almighty can hardly be such a fool as the churches make out.