The basic stimulus to the intelligence is doubt, a feeling that the meaning of an experience is not self-evident.

When I am in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a drawing room full of dukes.

Pleasure is by no means an infallible critical guide, but it is the least fallible.

Of all possible subjects, travel is the most difficult for an artist, as it is the easiest for a journalist.

The actors today really need the whip hand. They're so lazy. They haven't got the sense of pride in their profession that the less socially elevated musical comedy and music hall people or acrobats have. The theater has never been any good since the actors became gentlemen.

Genealogies are admirable things, provided they do not encourage the curious delusion that some families are older than others.

The ideal audience the poet imagines consists of the beautiful who go to bed with him, the powerful who invite him to dinner and tell him secrets of state, and his fellow-poets. The actual audience he gets consists of myopic schoolteachers, pimply young men who eat in cafeterias, and his fellow-poets. This means, in fact, he writes for his fellow-poets.