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.

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

Nobody ever wrote a good book simply by collecting a number of accurate facts and valid ideas.

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

No great thing happens suddenly.

Art is not a plaything, but a necessity, and its essence, form, is not a decorative adjustment, but a cup into which life can be poured and lifted to the lips and be tasted.

... 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.