Don't try so much to form your character - it's like trying to pull open a tight, tender young rose. Live as you like best and your character will take care of itself.

A swift carriage, of a dark night, rattling with four horses over roads that one can’t see--that’s my idea of happiness.

True happiness, we are told, consists in getting out of one's self; but the point is not only to get out - you must stay out; and to stay out you must have some absorbing errand.

Don't pass it by - the immediate, the real, the ours, the yours, the novelist's that it waits for.

A man who pretends to understand women is bad manners. For him to really to understand them is bad morals.

Experience was to be taken as showing that one might get a five-pound note as one got a light for a cigarette; but one had to check the friendly impulse to ask for it in the same way.

It is, I think, an indisputable fact that Americans are, as Americans, the most self-conscious people in the world, and the most addicted to the belief that the other nations of the earth are in a conspiracy to under value them.