You must not pursue a success, but fly from it.

The inclination to digress is human. But the dramatist must avoid it even more strenuously than the saint must avoid sin, for while sin may be venial, digression is mortal.

One can be very much in love with a woman without wishing to spend the rest of one's life with her.

Art, unless it leads to right action, is no more than the opium of an intelligentsia.

When I read a book I seem to read it with my eyes only, but now and then I come across a passage, perhaps only a phrase, which has a meaning for me, and it becomes part of me.

People talk of beauty lightly, and having no feeling for words, they use that one carelessly, so that it loses its force; and the thing it stands for, sharing its name with a hundred trivial objects, is deprived of dignity. They call beautiful a dress, a dog, a sermon; and when they are face to face with Beauty cannot recognise it.

Dying is the most hellishly boresome experience in the world! Particularly when it entails dying of 'natural causes'.