I met, not long ago, a young man who aspired to become a novelist. Knowing that I was in the profession, he asked me to tell him how he should set to work to realize his ambition. I did my best to explain. 'The first thing,' I said, 'is to buy quite a lot of paper, a bottle of ink, and a pen. After that you merely have to write.'

One cubic centimeter cures ten gloomy sentiments.

It’s embarrassing to tell you this, but it seems to come down mostly to just learning to be kinder.

Deprived of their newspapers or a novel, reading-addicts will fall back onto cookery books, on the literature which is wrapped around bottles of patent medicine, on those instructions for keeping the contents crisp which are printed on the outside of boxes of breakfast cereals. On anything.

The essay is a literary device for saying almost everything about almost anything

That we are not much sicker and much madder than we are is due exclusively to that most blessed and blessing of all natural graces, sleep.

"Consider the matter dispassionately, Mr. Foster, and you will see that no offence is so heinous as unorthodoxy of behaviour. Murder kills only the individual- and after all, wha is an individual? ". . . ." We can make a new one with the greatest of ease- as many as we like. Unorthodoxy threatens more than the life of a mere individual; it strikes at Society itself."