The happy marriage, which is the only proper nursery, is indissoluble. The unhappy marriage, which perpetually tells the child a bogey-man story about life, ought to be dissolved.

whatever a work of art may be, the artist certainly cannot dare to be simple. He must have a nature as complicated and as violent, as totally unsuggestive of the word innocence, as a modern war.

I cannot think that espionage can be recommended as a technique for building an impressive civilization. It's a lout's game.

Human beings are mercifully so constituted as to be able to conceal from themselves what they intend to do until they are well into the doing of it.

The mind is its own enemy, that fights itself with the innumerable pliant and ineluctable arms of the octopus.

Writing has nothing to do with communication between person and person, only with communication between different parts of a person's mind.

sentences were used by man before words and still come with the readiness of instinct to his lips. They, and not words, are the foundations of all language. ... Your cat has no words, but it has considerable feeling for the architecture of the sentence in relation to the problem of expressing climax.