People before the public live an imagined life in the thought of others, and flourish or feel faint as their self outside themselves grows bright or dwindles in that mirror.

Money and sex are forces too unruly for our reason; they can only be controlled by taboos with which we tamper at our peril.

Every author, however modest, keeps a most outrageous vanity chained like a madman in the padded cell of his breast.

The old know what they want; the young are sad and bewildered.

What humbugs we are, who pretend to live for beauty, and never see the dawn!

Eat with the rich, but go to the play with the poor, who are capable of joy.

The notion of making money by popular work, and then retiring to do good work, is the most familiar of all the devil's traps for artists.