The critic's hankering to be law-giver rather than servant of literature is irrepressible.

In Europe, war is a disease which has been in the family for generations: no one is surprised when it makes another leap. Even the patient only attends to it with part of his mind.

Perhaps this is in the end what most marriages are - gentleness, memory, and habit.

A nation has honor precisely as it has fleas - on this or that body. The statesman who talks of honor - unless he means something else, quite different - is a rogue.

If you think with enough energy about a hoped-for event, it will in the end happen. Not because you willed it. Because it was all the time in your nature.

You can't argue with a raging want. You can, but it is useless.

All writers who can claim to be called 'living' must be political in a sense. They must have what the Quakers call a concern to understand what is happening in the world, and must engage themselves, in their writing, to promote no comfortable lies, of the sort which people will pay well to be told rather than the truth.