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

I imagine you come across a number of people who are disconcerted by the difference between what you do feel and what they fancy you ought to feel. It is fatal to pay the smallest attention to them.

Well-bred English people never have imagination.

To the average man, life presents itself, not as material malleable to his hand, but as a series of problems...which he has to solve...And he is distressed to find that the more means he can dispose of-such as machine-power, rapid transport, and general civilized amenities, the more his problems grow in hardness and complexity....Perhaps the first thing he can learn form the artists is that the only way of 'mastering' one's material is to abandon the whole conception of mastery and to co-operate with it in love: whosoever will be a lord of life, let him be its servant.

A continual atmosphere of hectic passion is very trying if you haven't got any of your own.

The Devil is a spiritual lunatic, but, like many lunatics, he is extremely plausible and cunning.

He had the appeal of a very young dog of a very large breed -- a kind of amiable absurdity.