To the artist is sometimes granted a sudden, transient insight which serves in this matter for experience. A flash, and where previously the brain held a dead fact, the soul grasps a living truth! At moments we are all artists.

You can only acquire really useful general ideas by first acquiring particular ideas . . . You cannot make bricks without straw.

It is within the experience of everyone that when pleasure and pain reach a certain intensity they are indistinguishable.

The test of a first-rate work, and a test of your sincerity in calling it a first-rate work, is that you finish it.

No mind, however loving, could bear to see plainly into all the recess of another mind.

Nearly all bookish people are snobs, and especially the more enlightened among them. They are apt to assume that if a writer has immense circulation, if he is enjoyed by plain persons, and if he can fill several theatres at once, he cannont possibly be worth reading and merits only indifference and disdain.

Good taste is better than bad taste, but bad taste is better than no taste.