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.

Whatever happens, never forget that people would rather be led to perdition by a man, than to victory by a woman.

The American struggle for the vote was much more difficult than the English for the simple reason that it was much more easy.

the reward for total abstinence from alcohol seems, illogically enough, to be the capacity for becoming intoxicated without it.

The main difference between men and women is that men are lunatics and women are idiots.

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

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.