Nearly all the Escapists in the long past have managed their own budget and their social relations so unsuccessfully that I wouldn't want them for my landlords, or my bankers, or my neighbors. They were valuable, like powerful stimulants, only when they were left out of the social and industrial routine.

Let people go on talking as they like, and we will go on living as we think best.

Give the people a new word and they think they have a new fact.

Setting ... is accident. Either a building is part of a place, or it is not. Once that kinship is there, time will only make it stronger.

I have sometimes thought that his bursts of imaginative talk were fatal to his poetic gift. He squandered too much in the heat of personal communication.

Even the wicked get worse than they deserve.

Nothing mattered ... but writing books, and living the kind of life that made it possible to write them.