The Moon! Artemis! the great goddess of the splendid past of men! Are you going to tell me she is a dead lump?

Nobody knows you. You don't know yourself. And I, who am half in love with you, What am I in love with? My own imaginings?

I love Italian opera - it's so reckless. Damn Wagner, and his bellowings at Fate and death. Damn Debussy, and his averted face. I like the Italians who run all on impulse, and don't care about their immortal souls, and don't worry about the ultimate.

That is almost the whole of Russian literature: the phenomenal coruscations of the souls of quite commonplace people.

I'll do my life work, sticking up for the love between man and woman.

I'd be ashamed to see a woman walking around with my name-label on her, address and railway station, like a wardrobe trunk.

Literary criticism can be no more than a reasoned account of the feeling produced upon the critic by the book he is criticising.