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.

Idleness is only a coarse name for my infinite capacity for living in the present.

I review novels to make money, because it is easier for a sluggard to write an article a fortnight than a book a year, because the writer is soothed by the opiate of action, the crank by posing as a good journalist, and having an air hole. I dislike it. I do it and I am always resolving to give it up.

Hate is crystallized fear, fear's dividend, fear objectivized. We hate what we fear and so where hate is, fear will be lurking.

When we have ceased to love the stench of the human animal, either in others or in ourselves, then are we condemned to misery, and clear thinking can begin.

Like water, we are truest to our nature in repose.

The shock, for an intelligent writer, of discovering for the first time that there are people younger than himself who think him stupid is severe.