Like many popular best-sellers, he was a very sad and solemn man who took himself too seriously and his art not seriously enough.

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.

The mark of genius is an incessant activity of mind. Genius is a spiritual greed.

I am under the spell of language, which has ruled me since I was 10.

Short stories can be rather stark and bare unless you put in the right details. Details make stories human, and the more human a story can be, the better.

It is well known that, when two authors meet, they at once start talking about money-like everyone else.

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