When I see that the nineteenth century has crowned the idolatry of Art with the deification of Love, so that every poet is supposed to have pierced to the holy of holies when he has announced that Love is the Supreme, or the Enough, or the All, I feel that Art was safer in the hands of the most fanatical of Cromwell's major generals than it will be if ever it gets into mine.

In literature the ambition of the novice is to acquire the literary language; the struggle of the adept is to get rid of it.

A lifetime of happiness! No man alive could bear it: it would be hell on earth.

The road to ignorance is paved with good editors.

Revolutions have never lightened the burden of tyranny; they have only shifted it to another shoulder.

We sing in a church, why can we not dance there?

It is always necessary to overstate a cast startlingly to make people sit up and listen to it, and to frighten them into acting on it.