Mediocrity would always win by force of numbers, but it would win only more mediocrity.
Evidently, whatever else marriage might prevent, it was not a remedy for isolation of spirit.
What depresses me is the inevitable way the second rate forges ahead and the deserving is left behind.
Nothing, except the weather report or a general maxim of conduct, is so unsafe to rely upon as a theory of fiction.
And where was happiness if it sprung not from the soil? Where contentment if it dwelt not near to Nature?
Knowledge, like experience, is valid in fiction only after it has dissolved and filtered down through the imagination into reality.
I suppose I am a born novelist, for the things I imagine are more vital and vivid to me than the things I remember.
A doctrine of endurance flows easily from our lips when we are enduring jam and our neighbors dry bread, and it is still possible for us to become resigned to the afflictions of our brother.
But, of course only morons would ever think or speak of themselves as intellectuals. That’s why they all look so sad.
It would appear, from the best examples, that the proper way of beginning a preface to one’s work is with a humble apology for having written at all.
Nothing is more trying than nerves to people who have none.
I never saw the man yet that came out of politics as clean as he went into ’em...
Like all born politicians, their eye was for the main chance rather than for the argument, and they found it easier to forswear a conviction than to forego a comfort.
It seems to me that this is the true test for poetry: – that it should go beneath experience, as prose can never do, and awaken an apprehension of things we have never, and can never, know in the actuality.
There is no monster more destructive than the inventive mind that has outstripped philosophy.
Surely the novel should be a form of art – but art was not enough. It must contain not only the perfection of art, but the imperfection of nature.
For me, the novel is experience illumined by imagination...
Life has taught me that the greatest tragedy is not to die too soon but to live too long.
Passion alone could destroy passion. All the thinking in the world could not make so much as a dent in its surface.
Pessimism is the affectation of youth, the reality of age.
Life may take away happiness. But it can’t take away having had it.