I hate American simplicity. I glory in the piling up of complications of every sort. If I could pronounce the name James in any different or more elaborate way I should be in favor of doing it.

It might seem that an egg which has succeeded in being fresh has done all that can reasonably be expected of it.

In a play, certainly, the subject is of more importance than in any other work of art. Infelicity, triviality, vagueness of subject, may be outweighed in a poem, a novel, or a picture, by charm of manner, by ingenuity of execution; but in a drama the subject is of the essence of the work-it is the work. If it is feeble, the work can have no force; if it is shapeless, the work must be amorphous.

If you have work to do, don't wait to feel like it; set to work and you will feel like it.

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

I intend to judge things for myself; to judge wrongly, I think, is more honorable than not to judge at all.

Life being all inclusion and confusion, and art being all discrimination and selection, the latter, in search of the hard latent value with which it alone is concerned, sniffs round the mass as instinctively and unerringly as a dog suspicious of some buried bone.