There are times when one is tempted to say that the great, sprawling, lethargic sin of Sloth is the oldest and greatest of the sins and the parent of all the rest.

I think this co-operative scheme is an uncommonly good one. It's much easier to work on someone else's job than one's own - gives one that delightful feelin' of interferin' and bossin' about, combined with the glorious sensation that another fellow is takin' all one's own work off one's hands.

the autobiography is at one and the same time a single element in the series of the writer's created works and an interpretation of the whole series.

The one thing which seems to me quite impossible is to take into consideration the kind of book one is expected to write; surely one can only write the book that is there to be written.

But if it ever occurs to people to value the honor of the mind equally with the honor of the body, we shall get a social revolution of a quite unparalleled sort — and very different from the kind that is being made at the moment.

To make a deliberate falsification for personal gain is the last, worst depth to which either scholar or artist can descend in work or life.

Here be dragons to be slain, here be rich rewards to gain; If we perish in the seeking, why, how small a thing is death!