The principle of avoiding the unnecessary expenditure of energy has enabled the species to survive in a world full of stimuli; but it prevents the survival of the aristocracy.

It would be no loss to the world if most of the writers now writing had been strangled at birth.

... in the happy laughter of a theatre audience one can get the most immediate and numerically impressive guarantee that there is nothing in one's mind which is not familiar to the mass of persons living at the time.

Fiction and poetry are the only way one can stop time and give an account of an experience and nail it down so that it lasts for ever.

Destiny is another name for humanity's half-hearted yet persistent search for death. Again and again peoples have had the chance to live and show what would happen if human life were irrigated by continual happiness; and they have preferred to blow up the canals and perish of drought.

Birds sat on the telegraph wires that spanned the river as the black notes sit on a staff of music.

Art is not a luxury, but a necessity.