The secret of popular writing is never to put more on a given page than the common reader can lap off it with no strain whatsoever on his habitually slack attention.

There is no reason why the same man should like the same books at eighteen and at forty-eight

Discoveries are made by gluttons and addicts. The man who forgets to eat and sleep has an appetite for fact, for interrelations among causes.

Music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance... poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music.

A real building is one on which the eye can light and stay lit.

where the dead walked and the living were made of cardboard.

Literature does not exist in a vacuum. Writers as such have a definite social function exactly proportional to their ability as writers. This is their main use.