Heaven deliver us, what's a poet? Something that can't go to bed without making a song about it.

To start with invention is the mark of the fertile mind ... and leads later to the interpretation of experience; to start with the reproduction of experience is the infallible index of a barren invention.

[N]othing about a book is so unmistakable and so irreplaceable as the stamp of the cultured mind. I don't care what the story is about or what may be the momentary craze for books that appear to have been hammered out by the village blacksmith in a state of intoxication; the minute you get the easy touch of the real craftsman with centuries of civilisation behind him, you get literature.

There are crimes which the Law cannot reach.

Except ye become as little children, except you can wake on your fiftieth birthday with the same forward-looking excitement and interest in life that you enjoyed when you were five, "ye cannot enter the kingdom of God." One must not only die daily, but every day we must be born again.

If people will bring dynamite into a powder factory, they must expect explosions.

I'm getting very old and my bones ache. My sins are deserting me, and if I could only have my time over again I'd take care to commit more of them.