I never could get on with representative individuals but people who existed on their own account and with whom it might therefore be possible to be friends.

America is rather like life. You can usually find in it what you look for It will probably be interesting, and it is sure to be large.

Suspense: the only literary tool that has any effect upon tyrants and savages.

Italy is such a delightful place to live in if you happen to be a man. There one may enjoy that exquisite luxury of Socialism--that true Socialism which is based not on equality of income or character, but on the equality of manners. In the democracy of the caffè or the street the great question of our life has been solved, and the brotherhood of man is a reality. But it is accomplished at the expense of the sisterhood of women.

Towns are after all excrescences, grey fluxions, where men, hurrying to find one another, have lost themselves.

If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.

The businessman who assumes that his life is everything, and the mystic who asserts that it is nothing, fail, on this side and on that, to hit the truth. ‘Yes, I see, dear; it’s about half-way between,’ Aunt Juley had hazarded in earlier years. No; truth, being alive, was not halfway between anything. It was only to be found by continuous excursions into either realm, and though proportion is the final secret, to espouse it at the outset is to ensure sterility.