The great art of writing is the art of making people real to themselves with words.

What pursuit is more elegant than that of collecting the ignominies of our nature and transfixing them for show, each on the bright pin of a polished phrase?

It's an odd thing about this universe that, though we all disagree with each other, we are all of us always in the right.

The word snob belongs to the sour-grape vocabulary.

Only among people who think no evil can Evil monstrously flourish.

To become young again would seem to me an appalling prospect. Youth is a kind of delirium, which can be cured, if it is ever cured at all, by years of painful treatment.

It is the dread of something happening, something unknown and dreadful, that makes us do anything to keep the flicker of talk from dying out.