Ideals are dangerous things. Realities are better. They wound, but they're better.

A sentimentalist is simply one who desires to have the luxury of an emotion without paying for it.

I treated Art as the supreme reality and life as a mere mode of fiction.

Ultimately the bond of all companionship, whether in marriage or in friendship, is conversation, and conversation must have a common basis, and between two people of widely different culture the only common basis possible is the lowest level.

When good Americans die, they go to Paris" "Where do bad Americans go?" "They stay in America

I tremble with pleasure when I think that on the very day of my leaving prison both the laburnum and the lilac will be blooming in the gardens, and that I shall see the wind stir into restless beauty the swaying gold of the one, and make the other toss the pale purple of its plumes, so that all the air shall be Arabia for me.

I am quite incapable of understanding how any work of art can be criticized from a moral standpoint. The sphere of art and the sphere of ethics are absolutely distinct and separate.