The public will believe anything, so long as it is not founded on truth.

If one is a greyhound, why try to look like a Pekingese?

The aim of flattery is to soothe and encourage us by assuring us of the truth of an opinion we have already formed about ourselves.

Isn't it curious how one has only to open a book of verse to realise immediately that it was written by a very fine poet, or else that it was written by someone who is not a poet at all. In the case of the former, the lines, the images, though they are inherent in each other, leap up and give one this shock of delight. In the case of the latter, they lie flat on the page, never having lived.

Still falls the rain - dark as the world of man, black as our loss - blind as the nineteen hundred and forty nails upon the Cross.

All great art contains an element of the irrational.

Virginia Woolf, I enjoyed talking to her, but thought nothing of her writing. I considered her 'a beautiful little knitter.