... why do people who live in the country always give themselves such airs?

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

I am writing to a rhythm and not to a plot.

To make ideas effective, we must be able to fire them off. We must put them into action.

I like books whose virtue is all drawn together in a page or two. I like sentences that don't budge though armies cross them.

Our apparitions, the things you know us by, are simply childish. Beneath it is all dark, it is all spreading, it is unfathomably deep; but now and again we rise to the surface and that is what you see us by.

Few people ask from books what books can give us. Most commonly we come to books with blurred and divided minds, asking of fiction that it shall be true, of poetry that it shall be false, of biography that it shall be flattering, of history that it shall enforce our own prejudices. If we could banish all such preconceptions when we read, that would be an admirable beginning.