A masterpiece is something said once and for all, stated, finished, so that it's there complete in the mind, if only at the back.

The intellect, divine as it is, and all worshipful, has a habit of lodging in the most seedy of carcasses, and often, alas, acts the cannibal among the other faculties so that often, where the Mind is biggest, the Heart, the Senses, Magnanimity, Charity, Tolerance, Kindliness, and the rest of them scarcely have room to breathe.

Nothing induces me to read a novel except when I have to make money by writing about it. I detest them.

He smiled the most exquisite smile, veiled by memory, tinged by dreams.

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

A sort of transaction went on between them, in which she was on one side, and life was on another, and she was always trying to get the better of it, as it was of her.

loveliness is infernally sad.