"Odd how the creative power at once brings the whole universe to order"
"Nothing induces me to read a novel except when I have to make money by writing about it. I detest them"
"Why are women... so much more interesting to men than men are to women?"
"This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room"
"These are the soul's changes. I don't believe in ageing. I believe in forever altering one's aspect to the sun. Hence my optimism"
"There is much to support the view that it is clothes that wear us, and not we, them; we may make them take the mould of arm or breast, but they mould our hearts, our brains, our tongues to their liking"
"There can be no two opinions as to what a highbrow is. He is the man or woman of thoroughbred intelligence who rides his mind at a gallop across country in pursuit of an idea"
"The older one grows, the more one likes indecency"
"The man who is aware of himself is henceforward independent; and he is never bored, and life is only too short, and he is steeped through and through with a profound yet temperate happiness"
"The history of men's opposition to women's emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself"
"Really I don't like human nature unless all candied over with art"
"One of the signs of passing youth is the birth of a sense of fellowship with other human beings as we take our place among them"
"One likes people much better when they're battered down by a prodigious siege of misfortune than when they triumph"
"One has to secrete a jelly in which to slip quotations down people's throats - and one always secretes too much jelly"
"My own brain is to me the most unaccountable of machinery - always buzzing, humming, soaring roaring diving, and then buried in mud. And why? What's this passion for?"
"We are nauseated by the sight of trivial personalities decomposing in the eternity of print"
"The beauty of the world, which is so soon to perish, has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder"
"It seems as if an age of genius must be succeeded by an age of endeavour; riot and extravagance by cleanliness and hard work"
"Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others"
"Where the Mind is biggest, the Heart, the Senses, Magnanimity, Charity, Tolerance, Kindliness, and the rest of them scarcely have room to breathe"
"The beautiful seems right by force of beauty, and the feeble wrong because of weakness"
"This is not writing at all. Indeed, I could say that Shakespeare surpasses literature altogether, if I knew what I meant"
"It is the nature of the artist to mind excessively what is said about him. Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others"
"Yet it is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top"
