Life — how curious is that habit that makes us think it is not here, but elsewhere.

A short story is. . .frequently the celebration of character at bursting point.

I shall never be as old as I was between 20 and 30.

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 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.

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

How extraordinary it is that one feels most guilt about the sins one is unable to commit.