"We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us."
"What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote."
"If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country."
"To make us feel small in the right way is a function of art; men can only make us feel small in the wrong way."
"The only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little farther down our particular path than we have yet got ourselves."
"Faith, to my mind, is a stiffening process, a sort of mental starch."
"Works of art, in my opinion, are the only objects in the material universe to possess internal order, and that is why, though I don't believe that only art matters, I do believe in Art for Art's sake."
"It is my fate and perhaps my temperament to sign agreements with fools."
"I am so used to seeing the sort of play which deals with one man and two women. They do not leave me with the feeling I have made a full theatrical meal they do not give me the experience of the multiplicity of life."
"The final test for a novel will be our affection for it, as it is the test of our friends, and of anything else which we cannot define."
"Spoon feeding in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon."
"Nonsense and beauty have close connections."
"We are not concerned with the very poor. They are unthinkable, and only to be approached by the statistician or the poet."
"Most quarrels are inevitable at the time; incredible afterwards."
"I have only got down on to paper, really, three types of people: the person I think I am, the people who irritate me, and the people I'd like to be."
"America is rather like life. You can usually find in it what you look for. It will probably be interesting, and it is sure to be large."
"There lies at the back of every creed something terrible and hard for which the worshipper may one day be required to suffer."
"One always tends to overpraise a long book, because one has got through it."
"At night, when the curtains are drawn and the fire flickers, my books attain a collective dignity."
"Unless we remember we cannot understand."
"We are willing enough to praise freedom when she is safely tucked away in the past and cannot be a nuisance. In the present, amidst dangers whose outcome we cannot foresee, we get nervous about her, and admit censorship."
"I distrust Great Men. They produce a desert of uniformity around them and often a pool of blood too, and I always feel a little man's pleasure when they come a cropper."
"The historian must have some conception of how men who are not historians behave. Otherwise he will move in a world of the dead. He can only gain that conception through personal experience, and he can only use his personal experiences when he is a genius."
"Very notable was his distinction between coarseness and vulgarity, coarseness, revealing something; vulgarity, concealing something."
"Creative writers are always greater than the causes that they represent."
