Talent is a long patience, and originality an effort of will and intense observation.

What seems to me the highest and the most difficult achievement of Art is not to make us laugh or cry, or to rouse our lust or our anger, but to do as nature does-that is, fill us with wonderment.

One mustn't always believe that feeling is everything. In the arts, it is nothing without form.

What a heavy oar the pen is, and what a strong current ideas are to row in!

Criticism occupies the lowest place in the literary hierarchy: as regards form, almost always; and as regards moral value, incontestably. It comes after rhyming games and acrostics, which at least require a certain inventiveness.

Do not imagine you can exorcise what oppresses you in life by giving vent to it in art.

I’m dazzled by your facility. In ten days you’ll have written six stories! I don’t understand it… I’m like one of those old aqueducts: there’s so much rubbish cogging up the banks of my thought that it flows slowly, and only spills from the end of my pen drop by drop.