Behind it was that vast suspension bridge which always troubles me because it reminds me that in this mechanized age I am as little able to understand my environment as any primitive woman who thinks that a waterfall is inhabited by a spirit, and indeed less so, for her opinion might from a poetical point of view be correct.

I wonder if we are all wrong about each other, if we are just composing unwritten novels about the people we meet?

In England and America a beard usually means that its owner would rather be considered venerable than virile; on the continent of Europe it often means that its owner makes a special claim to virility.

Any authentic work of art must start an argument between the artist and his audience.

There was a definite process by which one made people into friends, and it involved talking to them and listening to them for hours at a time.

works of art feel towards human beings exactly as we do towards ghosts. The transparency of spectres, the diffuseness in space which lets them drift through doors and walls, and their smell of death, disgust us not more than we disgust works of art by our meaninglessness, our diffuseness in time which lets us drift through three score years and ten without a quarter as much significance as a picture establishes instantaneously.

His smile bore the same relation to a real smile as false teeth do to real teeth.