Only mediocre people are at the best all the time.

We do not write as we want, but as we can.

From old habit, unconsciously he thanked God that he no longer believed in Him.

A bird in the hand was worth two in the bush, he told her, to which she retorted that a proverb was the last refuge of the mentally destitute.

But I am not sure it would contain any short stories. For the short story is a minor art, and it must content itself with moving, exciting and amusing the reader. ...I do not think that there is any (short story) that will give the reader that thrill, that rapture, that fruitful energy which great art can produce.

It's asking a great deal that things should appeal to your reason as well as your sense of the aesthetic. - Of Human Bondage

A man who is a politician at forty is a statesman at three score and ten. It is at this age, when he would be too old to be a clerk or a gardener or a police-court magistrate, that he is ripe to govern a country.