What critics often ask for is the impossible, though this may be a salutary means of extending the borders of art.

The state is never so efficient as when it wants money.

Hitler was a teetotalitarian.

The aura of the theocratic death penalty for adultery still clings to America, even outside New England, and multiple divorce, which looks to the European like serial polygamy, is the moral solution to the problem of the itch. Love comes into it too, of course, but in Europe we tend to see marital love as an eternity which encompasses hate and also indifference: when we promise to love we really mean that we promise to honor a contract. Americans, seeming to take marriage with not enough seriousness, are really taking love and sex with too much.

Every grain of experience is food for the greedy growing soul of the artist.

Bath twice a day to be really clean, once a day to be passably clean, once a week to avoid being a public menace.

Reviewers do not read books with much care . . . their profession is more given to stupidity and malice and literary ignorance even than the profession of novelist.