you have to love life to have life, and you need to have life to love life

Life is a fatal adventure. It can only have one end. So why not make it as far-ranging and free as possible.

Every good thing in the world stands on the razor-edge of danger.

Seek the lofty by reading, hearing and seeing great work at some moment every day.

Favors cease to be favors when there are conditions attached to them.

Every writer is necessarily a critic - that is, each sentence is a skeleton accompanied by enormous activity of rejection; and each selection is governed by general principles concerning truth, force, beauty, and so on. The critic that is in every fabulist is like the iceberg - nine-tenths of him is under water.

A convention is an agreed-upon falsehood, a permitted lie.