The artists who the world has always recognized as the greatest are those with the widest sympathy. The greatness of the great artist depends precisely on the width and the intensity of his sympathy.

One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them.

The most valuable of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, when it has to be done, whether you like it or not.

And so, resisting the temptation to wallow in artistic remorse, I prefer to leave both well and ill alone and to think about something else

I wanted to change the world. But I have found that the only thing one can be sure of changing is oneself.

I have discovered the most exciting, the most arduous literary form of all, the most difficult to master, the most pregnant in curious possibilities. I mean the advertisement. It is far easier to write ten passably effective Sonnets, good enough to take in the not too inquiring critic, than one effective advertisement that will take in a few thousand of the uncritical buying public.

The mockery made him feel an outsider; and feeling an outsider he behaved like one, which increased the prejudice against him and intensified the contempt and hostility aroused by his physical defects. Which in turn increased his sense of being alien and alone. A chronic fear of being slighted made him avoid his equals, made him stand, where his inferiors were concerned, self-consciously on his dignity.