There is a brief time for sex, and a long time when sex is out of place. But when it is out of place as an activity there still should be the large and quiet space in the consciousness where it lives quiescent. Old people can have a lovely quiescent sort of sex, like apples, leaving the young quite free for their sort.

It's not art for art's sake, it's art for my sake.

The novel is the highest form of human expression so far attained. Why? Because it is so incapable of the absolute.

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

She herself had never been able to be altogether herself: it had been denied her.

It is so much more difficult to live with one's body than with one's soul. One's body is so much more exacting: what it won't have it won't have, and nothing can make bitter into sweet.

Personality and mind, like moustaches, belong to a certain age. They are a deformity in a child.... Leave his sensibilities, his emotions, his spirit, and his mind severely alone. There is the devil in mothers, that they must provoke personalresponse from their infants.