...I have always lived on contrasts! To me the only death is monotony. Beware of monotony; it's the mother of all the deadly sins.

I despair of the Republic! Such dreariness, such whining sallow women, such utter absence of the amenities, such crass food, crass manners, crass landscape!! What a horror it is for a whole nation to be developing without the sense of beauty, and eating bananas for breakfast.

Society soon grows used to any state of things which is imposed upon it without explanation.

My first few weeks in America are always miserable, because the tastes I am cursed with are all of a kind that cannot be gratified here, and I am not enough in sympathy with our gross public to make up for the lack on the aesthetic side. One's friends are delightful; but we are none of us Americans, we don't think or feel as the Americans do, we are the wretched exotics produced in a European glass-house, the most displaced and useless class on earth!

After all, one knows one's weak points so well, that it's rather bewildering to have the critics overlook them and invent others.

In all the arts abundance seems to be one of the surest signs of vocation.

What a shame it is for a nation to be developing without a sense of beauty, and eating bananas for breakfast.