A downtrodden class... will never be able to make an effective protest until it achieves solidarity.

Nothing leads so straight to futility as literary ambitions without systematic knowledge.

If anything is possible, then nothing is interesting

Only people who are well off can be - complex.

The man was running away with the rest, and selling his papers for a shilling each as he ran—a grotesque mingling of profit and panic.

[A novel by Henry James] is like a church lit but without a congregation to distract you, with every light and line focused on the high altar. And on the altar, very reverently place, intensely there, is a dead kitten, an egg-shell, a bit of string.

Biologically the species is the accumulation of the experiments of all its successful individuals since the beginning.