One day I shall write a little book of conduct myself, and I shall call it Social Problems of the Unsociable. And the root problem, beneath a hundred varying manifestions, is How to Escape. How to escape, that is, at those times, be they few or frequent, when you want to keep yourself to yourself.

It is to the eccentrics that the world owes most of its knowledge.

Women have one great advantage over men. It is commonly thought that if they marry they have done enough, and need career no further. If a man marries, on the other hand, public opinion is all against him if he takes this view.

Nearly all novels are too long.

As to the family, I have never understood how that fits in with the other ideals --or, indeed, why it should be an ideal at all. A group of closely related persons living under one roof; it is a convenience, often a necessity, sometimes a pleasure, sometimes the reverse; but who first exalted it as admirable, an almost religious ideal?

Why is humanity so excessive in the way it does things? The golden mean seems out of fashion.

There's one thing about freedom ... each generation of people begins by thinking they've got it for the first time in history, and ends by being sure the generation younger than themselves have too much of it. It can't really always have been increasing at the rate people suppose, or there would be more of it by now.