Life's so ordinary that literature has to deal with the exceptional. Exceptional talent, power, social position, wealth.... Dramabegins where there's freedom of choice. And freedom of choice begins when social or psychological conditions are exceptional. That's why the inhabitants of imaginative literature have always been recruited from the pages of Who's Who.

To his dog, every man is Napoleon; hence the constant popularity of dogs.

But the quiet grows and grows. Beautifully and unbearably.

Human contacts have been so highly valued in the past only because reading was not a common accomplishment.... The world, you must remember, is only just becoming literate. As reading becomes more and more habitual and widespread, an ever-increasing number of people will discover that books will give them all the pleasures of social life and none of its intolerable tedium.

Higher education is not necessarily a guarantee of higher virtue.

Every man's memory is his private literature.

Faith, it is evident, may be relied on to produce sustained action and, more rarely, sustained contemplation.