You must always believe that life is as extraordinary as music says it is.

It is a great pity that every human being does not, at an early stage of his life, have to write a historical work. He would then realize that the human race is in quite a jam about truth.

There is, of course, no reason for the existence of the male sex except that one sometimes needs help with moving the piano.

Olive Schreiner is less a woman than a geographical fact. Just as one thinks of Egypt as a foreground for the Pyramids, so South Africa seems the setting of that warm, attractive, aggressive personality. Her work is far inferior to her.

... 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.

I have no faith in the sense of comforting beliefs which persuade me that all my troubles are blessings in disguise.

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.