It occurred to me that my speech or my silence, indeed any action of mine, would be a mere futility.

There are men here and there to whom the whole of life is like an after-dinner hour with a cigar; easy, pleasant, empty, perhaps enlivened by some fable of strife to be forgotten - before the end is told - even if there happens to be any end to it.

A historian may be an artist too, and a novelist is a historian, the preserver, the keeper, the expounder, of human experience.

There is something haunting in the light of the moon.

All ambitions are lawful except those which climb upward on the miseries or credulities of mankind.

You can't breathe dead hippo waking, sleeping, and eating, and at the same time keep your precarious grip on existence.

Only in men's imagination does every truth find an effective and undeniable existence. Imagination, not invention, is the supreme master of art as of life.