...it is not what one has experienced but what one does with what one has experienced that matters.

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.

We are so anxious to achieve some particular end that we never pay attention to the psycho-physical means whereby that end is to be gained. So far as we are concerned, any old means is good enough. But the nature of the universe is such that ends can never justify the means. On the contrary, the means always determine the end.

The propagandist's purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.

There is no substitute for talent. Industry and all its virtues are of no avail.

Hell isn't merely paved with good intentions; it's walled and roofed with them. Yes, and furnished too.

Those who meant well behaved in the same way as those who meant badly.