What you fear most will happen to you - that is the law.

Sometimes, surely, truth is closer to imagination or to intelligence, to love than to fact? To be accurate is not to be right.

It is the impulse of our century, with its nearly religious belief in magnitude, to fling an institution into every void.

I never had, or wished for, power over you. That isn't true, of course. I wanted the greatest power of all. but not advantage, or authority.

In the circle where I was raised, I knew of no one knowledgeable in the visual arts, no one who regularly attended musical performances, and only two adults other than my teachers who spoke without embarrassment of poetry and literature — both of these being women. As far as I can recall, I never heard a man refer to a good or a great book. I knew no one who had mastered, or even studied, another language from choice. And our articulate, conscious life proceeded without acknowledgement of the preceding civilisations which had produced it.

For most people it's easier to support an eminent person in deserved disgrace than an obscure one who has been wronged.

It's nervous work. The state you need to write in is the state that others are paying large sums of money to get rid of.