one should discuss one's difficulties only when they are over.

Art is for [the Irish] inseparable from artifice: of that, the theatre is the home. Possibly, it was England made me a novelist.

...there must be something she wanted; and that therefore she was no lady.

I know that I have in my make-up layers of synthetic experiences, and that the most powerful of my memories are only half true.

Mr. [Aldous] Huxley has been the alarming young man for a long time, a sort of perpetual clever nephew who can be relied on to flutter the lunch party. Whatever will he say next? How does he think of those things? He has been deplored once or twice, but feeling is in his favor: he is steadily read. He is at once the truly clever person and the stupid person's idea of the clever person; he is expected to be relentless, to administer intellectual shocks.

Almost everyone admits to hunger during the Opera.... Hunger is so exalting that during a last act you practically levitate.

Some ideas, like dandelions in lawns, strike tenaciously: you may pull off the top but the root remains, drives down suckers and may even sprout again.