Chaucer, I confess, is a rough diamond; and must be polished e'er he shines.
I can find my biography in every fable that I read.
Literature is mostly about sex and not much about having children; and life is the other way around.
Literature is my utopia.
Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice; journalism what will be grasped at once.
Literature was formerly an art and finance a trade: today it is the reverse.
Oh! Let us never, never doubt What nobody is sure about.
Science is uneasy with beginnings. Mythology is concerned above all with what happened "in the beginning". Its signature is "Once upon a time".
The first thing to be done by a biographer in estimating character is to examine the stubs of the victim's cheque books.
The llama is a woolly sort of fleecy hairy goat, with an indolent expression and an undulating throat like an unsuccessful literary man.
The universe is made up of stories, not of atoms.
Those expressions are omitted which cannot with propriety be read aloud in the family.
What is a diary as a rule? A document useful to the person who keeps it, dull to the contemporary who reads it and invaluable to the student, centuries afterwards, who treasures it!
When a man can observe himself suffering and is able, later, to describe what he's gone through, it means he was born for literature.
When I read Shakespeare I am struck with wonder that such trivial people should muse and thunder in such lovely language.
Literature is the effort of man to indemnify himself for the wrongs of his condition.
The short story is the art form that deals with the individual when there is no longer a society to absorb him, and when he is compelled to exist, as it were, by his own inner light.
A novel is never anything but a philosophy put into images.
Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of the man - the biography of the man himself cannot be written.
What is an epigram? A dwarfish whole, its body brevity, and wit its soul.