As nobody can possibly tell me whether one's writing is bad or good, the only certain value is one's own pleasure. I am sure of that.

The comparison between Coleridge and Johnson is obvious in so far as each held sway chiefly by the power of his tongue. The difference between their methods is so marked that it is tempting, but also unnecessary, to judge one to be inferior to the other. Johnson was robust, combative, and concrete; Coleridge was the opposite. The contrast was perhaps in his mind when he said of Johnson: "his bow-wow manner must have had a good deal to do with the effect produced.

How are we to account for the strange human craving for the pleasure of feeling afraid which is so much involved in our love of ghost stories?

I have lost friends, some by death...others by sheer inability to cross the street.

The poet gives us his essence, but prose takes the mould of the body and mind entire.

Facts must be manipulated; some must be brightened; others shaded; yet, in the process, they must never lose their integrity.

He looked very old. He looked, James thought, getting his head now against the Lighthouse, now against the waste of waters running away into the open, like some old stone lying on the sand; he looked as if he had become physically what was always at the back of both of their minds-that loneliness which was for both of them the truth about things.