The very stone one kicks with one's boot will outlast Shakespeare.

Consolation for those moments when you can't tell whether you're the divinest genius or the greatest fool in the world.

Masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.

As a creator of character his peculiarity is that he creates wherever his eyes rest ... With such a power at his command Dickens made his books blaze up, not by tightening the plot or sharpening the wit, but by throwing another handful of people upon the fire.

And now more than anything I want beautiful prose. I relish it more and more exquisitely.

One ought to sink to the bottom of the sea, probably, and live alone with one's words.

I got out this diary, & read as one always does read one's own writing, with a kind of guilty intensity.