Essential characteristic of the really great novelist: a Christ-like, all-embracing compassion.
If you’ve ever really been poor you remain poor at heart all your life. I’ve often walked when I could very well afford to take a taxi because I simply couldn’t bring myself to waste the shilling it would cost.
In search of ideas I spent yesterday morning in walking about, and went to the stores and bought things in four departments. A wonderful and delightful way of spending time. I think this sort of activity does stimulate creative ideas.
At moments we are all artists.
To write is to make oneself the echo of what cannot cease speaking.
Great wealth may be to its owner a blessing or a curse. Alas! I fear it is too often the latter. It hardens the heart, blunts the finer susceptibilities, and transforms into a fiend what under more favourable circumstances might have been a human being.
The saxophone is the embodied spirit of beer.
Saw Washington Monument. Phallic. Appalling. A national catastrophe.
You can turn over a new leaf every hour if you choose.
The entire landscape was illuminated and transformed by these unique pyrotechnics of labour atoning for its grime, and dull, weird sounds, as of the breathings and sighings of gigantic nocturnal creatures, filled the enchanted air.
We shall never have more time. We have, and always had, all the time there is.
Money is far commoner than time. When one reflects, one perceives that money is just about the commonest thing there is.
And if you don’t like that you can acquaint yourself with the axioms that neither you nor anybody else are the centre of the universe and that what you call complications are simply another name for life itself. Worry is life, and life is worry. And the absence of worry is death.
There was something magnificent in dire tragedy, in the terror of it, in the necessity which it laid upon everybody to behave nobly and efficiently.
I hate being asked what I want. Because I never know.
I’m not ruthless. It’s common sense that’s ruthless.
We go about in a world where secret influences are continually at work for us or against us, and we do not suspect their existence, because we have no imagination. For it needs imagination to perceive the truth – that is why the greatest poets are always the greatest teachers.
One may have spent one’s time badly, but one did spend it; one did do something with it, however ill-advised that something may have been. To do something else means a change of habits.
Good fiction is autobiography dressed in the colours of all mankind.
You can only waste the passing moment. You cannot waste to-morrow; it is kept for you.
Meat may go up in price – it has done – but books won’t. Admission to picture galleries and concerts and so forth will remain quite low. The views from Richmond Hill or Hindhead, or along Pall Mall at sunset, the smell of the earth, the taste of fruit and of kisses – these things are unaffected by the machinations of trusts and the hysteria of stock exchanges.