Art is one thing that can go on mattering once it has stopped hurting.

But in general, for the purposes of most novelists, the number of objects genuinely necessary for. . .describing a scene will be found to be very small.

Spoilt pleasure is a sad, unseemly thing; you can only bury it.

What's the matter with this country is the matter with the lot of us individually - our sense of personality is a sense of outrage.

memory is to love what the saucer is to the cup.

... in general, the Anglo-Irish do not make good dancers; they are too spritely and conscious; they are incapable of one kind of trance or of being seemingly impersonal. And, for the formal, pure dance they lack the formality: about their stylishness (for they have stylishness) there is something impromptu, slightly disorderly.

Illusions are art, for the feeling person, and it is by art that we live, if we do.