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.

All men should have a drop of treason in their veins, if nations are not to go soft like so many sleepy pears.

Art and propaganda have this much connection, that if a propaganda makes art impossible, it is clearly damned.

It isn't only living people who die, it is great stretches of living, which can die even when the people who lived there still exist.

Mr. Arnold Bennett feels he has ranked himself for ever as a dry wine by what he mixed with himself of Maupassant; nevertheless he has put on the market some grocer's Sauterne in the form of several novels that are highly sentimental so far as their fundamental balance of values is concerned.

If it be ungentlemanly to kiss and tell, it is still further from gentlemanliness to pray and tell.

Writing has nothing to do with communication between person and person, only with communication between different parts of a person's mind.