Among the masked dandies of Edwardian comedy, Max Beerbohm is the most happily armored by a deep and almost innocent love of himself as a work of art.

It is the role of the poet to look at what is happening in the world and to know that quite other things are happening.

We do not wish to be better than we are, but more fully what we are.

The detective novel is the art-for-art's-sake of our yawning Philistinism, the classic example of a specialized form of art removed from contact with the life it pretends to build on.

It is often said that in Ireland there is an excess of genius unsustained by talent; but there is talent in the tongues.

Because of the influence of the cinema, most reports or stories of violence are so pictorial that they lack content or meaning. The camera brings them to our eyes, but does not settle them in our minds, nor in time.

Writing enlarges the landscape of the mind.