I do not think anything serious should be done after dinner, as nothing should be before breakfast.

But the eighteenth century, on the whole, loathed melancholy.

But even gold is not everything: and only a fanatic, and a rather foolish fanatic, would say that this style of fiction summed up and exhausted all the good that fiction could give and do.

One of the best known, and one of the least intelligible, facts of literary history is the lateness, in Western European Literature at any rate, of prose fiction, and the comparative absence, in the two great classical languages, of what we call by that name.

The Italian prose tale had begun to exercise that influence as early as Chaucer's time: but circumstances and atmosphere were as yet unfavourable for its growth.

Miss Austen had shown the infinite possibilities of ordinary and present things for the novelist.

The hardest thing to attain... is the appreciation of difference without insisting on superiority.