The preface is the most important part of a book. Even reviewers read a preface.
The detective story is the normal recreation of noble minds.
The Lord Chief Justice of England recently said that the greater part of his judicial time was spent investigating collisions between propelled vehicles, each on its own side of the road, each sounding its horn and each stationary.
The Crimean War is one of the bad jokes of history.
Greatness is so often a courteous synonym for great success.
Success is little more than a chemical compound of man with moment.
Biography, like big game hunting, is one of the recognized forms of sport, and it is as unfair as only sport can be.
Any stigma, as the old saying is, will serve to beat a dogma.
The work of Henry James has always seemed divisible by a simple dynastic arrangement into three reigns: James I, James II, and the Old Pretender.
Autobiography is an unrivaled vehicle for telling the truth about other people.
Biography is a very definite region bounded on the north by history, on the south by fiction, on the east by obituary, and on the west by tedium.
People who jump to conclusions rarely alight on them.
History repeats itself. Historians repeat each other.