The artist is a member of the leisured classes who cannot pay for his leisure.

As repressed sadists are supposed to become policemen or butchers so those with an irrational fear of life become publishers.

No one over thirty-five is worth meeting who has not something to teach us, something more than we could learn for ourselves, from a book.

The true work of art is the one which the seventh wave of genius throws up the beach where the undertow of time cannot drag it back.

Civilization is an active deposit which is formed by the combustion of the Present with the Past. Neither in countries without a Present nor in those without a Past is it to be encountered. Proust in Venice, Matisse's birdcages overlooking the flower market at Nice, Gide on the seventeenth-century quais of Toulon, Lorca in Granada, Picasso by Saint-Germain-des-Prés: there lies civilization and for me it can exist only under those liberal regimes in which the Present is alive and therefore capable of assimilating the Past.

The true index of a man's character is the health of his wife.

There is immunity in reading, immunity in formal society, in office routine, in the company of old friends and in the giving of officious help to strangers, but there is no sanctuary in one bed from the memory of another. The past with its anguish will break through every defense-line of custom and habit; we must sleep and therefore we must dream.