In a sense, one can never read the book that the author originally wrote, and one can never read the same book twice.

Every work of art is a trick by which the artist manipulates appearances.

I really can't stand any more to pay for a burst of animation when someone comes in for drinks with a depressed and low-keyed next day, in which I have to go around on my hands and knees.

Real genius of moral insight is a motor which will start any engine.

The most immoral and disgraceful and dangerous thing that anybody can do in the arts is knowingly to feed back to the public its own ignorance and cheap tastes.

At 60 the sexual preoccupation, when it hits you, seems sometimes sharper, as if it were an elderly malady, like gout.

They [the English] have a special word, "civil," for what is elsewhere merely ordinary politeness.