No amount of reading and intelligent deduction could supplant the direct experience.

We lay on the ground and kissed. Perhaps you smile. That we only lay on the ground and kissed. You young people can lend your bodies now, play with them, give them as we could not. But remember that you have paid a price: that of a world rich in mystery and delicate emotion. It is not only species of animal that die out. But whole species of feeling. And if you are wise you will never pity the past for what it did not know. But pity yourself for what it did.

You put up with your voice and speak with it because you haven't any choice. But it's what you say that counts.

All novelists should live in two different worlds: a real one and an unreal one.

Art is a statement of one in the face of all; not a statement by one for the use of all.

I am one in a row of specimens. It's when I try to flutter out of line that he hates me. I'm meant to be dead, pinned, always the same, always beautiful. He knows that part of my beauty is being alive. but it's the dead me he wants. He wants me living-but-dead.

Thomas Beecham was a pompous little band-master who stood against everything creative in the art of his time.