Really I don't like human nature unless all candied over with art.

Every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.

...the problem of space remained, she thought, taking up her brush again. It glared at her. The whole mass of the picture was poised upon that weight. Beautiful and bright it should be on the surface, feathery and evanescent, one colour melting into another like the colours on a butterfly's wing; but beneath the fabric must be clamped together with bolts of iron.

for it was not knowledge but unity that she desired, not inscriptions on tablets, nothing that could be written in any language known to men, but intimacy itself, which is knowledge

What a labour writing is ... making one sentence do the work of a page; that's what I call hard work.

History is too much about wars; biography too much about great men.

Sir, I would trust you with my heart. Moreover, we have left our bodies in the banqueting hall. Those on the turf are the shadows of our souls.