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

Incessant company is as bad as solitary confinement.

Once she knows how to read there's only one thing you can teach her to believe in and that is herself.

Some collaboration has to take place in the mind between the woman and the man before the art of creation can be accomplished. Some marriage of opposites has to be consummated. The whole of the mind must lie wide open if we are to get the sense that the

Mr. Beerbohm in his way is perfect ... He has brought personality into literature, not unconsciously and impurely, but so consciously and purely that we do not know whether there is any relation between Max the essayist and Mr. Beerbohm the man. We only know that the spirit of personality permeates every word that he writes ... He is without doubt the prince of his profession.

People ask me why I write. I write to find out what I know.

For beyond the difficulty of communicating oneself, there is the supreme difficulty of being oneself.