Beauty plus pity -- that is the closest we can get to a definition of art.

I have the European urge to use my feet when a drive can be dispensed with.

I see nothing for the treatment of my misery but the melancholy and very local palliative of articulate art.

Loneliness as a situation can be corrected, but as a state of mind it is an incurable illness.

The good, the admirable reader identifies himself not with the boy or the girl in the book, but with the mind that conceived and composed that book.

In this crazy mirror of terror and art a pseudo-quotation made up of obscure Shakespeareanisms (Chapter Three) somehow produces, despite its lack of literal meaning, the blurred diminutive image of the acrobatic performance that so gloriously supplies the bravura ending for the next chapter.

No difference exists between American and European manners. A proletarian from Chicago can be just as Philistine as an English duke.