Once a secret society establishes itself within an open society, there is no end to the hideous mistrust it must cause.

Why must you always try to be omnipotent, and shove things about? Tragic things happen sometimes that we just have to submit to.

Everyone realizes that one can believe little of what people say about each other. But it is not so widely realized that even less can one trust what people say about themselves.

[The satirist] must fully possess, at least in the world of the imagination, the quality the lack of which he is deriding in others.

Writers on the subject of August Strindberg have hitherto omitted to mention that he could not write. ... Strindberg, who was neither a good nor a wise man, had a stroke of luck. He went mad. He lost the power of inhibition. Everything down to the pettiest suspicion that the dog had been given the leanest mutton chop, poured out of his lips. Men of his weakness and sensuality are usually, from their sheer brutishness, unable to express themselves. But Strindberg was mad and articulate. That is what makes him immortal.

Like all bad drivers, he [Henry Andrews] thought he was the best driver in the world...

No one can write a best-seller by taking thought. The slightest touch of insincerity blurs its appeal. The writer who keeps his tongue in his cheek, who knows that he is writing for fools and that, therefore, he had better write like a fool, makes a respectable living out of serials and novelettes; but he will never make the vast, the blaring, half a million success. That comes of blended sincerity and vitality.