It is impossible to foretell the future with any degree of accuracy, that it is impossible to rehearse life. A fault in the scenery, a face in the audience, an interruption of the audience on to the stage, and all our carefully planned gesture mean nothing, or mean too much.
All this fame and money, which have so thrilled me when they came to others, leave me cold when they come to me. I am not an ascetic, but I don't know what to do with them, and my daily life has never been so trying, and there is no one to fill it emotionally.
What is the good of your stars and trees, your sunrise and the wind, if they do not enter into our daily lives? They have never entered into mine, but into yours, we thought--Haven't we all to struggle against life's daily greyness, against pettiness, against mechanical cheerfulness, against suspicion? I struggle by remembering my friends; others I have known by remembering some place--some beloved place or tree--we thought you one of these.
No one is more triumphant than the man who chooses a worthy subject and masters all its facts.
Just as words have two functions - information and creation - so each human mind has two personalities, one on the surface, one deeper down. The upper personality... is conscious and alert... The lower personality is a... perfect fool, but without it there is no literature.
The work of art assumes the existence of the perfect spectator, and is indifferent to the fact that no such person exists.
He doesn't want you to be real, and to think and to live. He doesn't love you. But I love you. I want you to have your own thoughts and ideas and feelings, even when I hold you in my arms.
Human beings have their great chance in the novel.
When that strange race nears the dust and is condemned as untouchable, then nature remembers the physical perfection that she accomplished elsewhere, and throws out a god-not many, but one here and there, to prove to society how little its categories impress her.
Reverence is fatal to literature.
If human nature does alter it will be because individuals manage to look at themselves in a new way. Here and there people - a very few people, but a few novelists are among them - are trying to do this. Every institution and vested interest in against such a search: organized religion, the state, the family in its economic aspect, have nothing to gain, and it is only when outward prohibitions weaken that it can proceed: history conditions it to that extent.
I have always found writing pleasant and don't understand what people mean by 'throes of creation.'
Passion does not blind. No. Passion is sanity, and the woman you love, she is the only person you will ever really understand.
She must be assured that it is not a criminal offense to love at first sight.
It is the vice of a vulgar mind to be thrilled by bigness.
Towns are after all excrescences, grey fluxions, where men, hurrying to find one another, have lost themselves.
The final test for a novel will be our affection for it, as it is the test of our friends, and of anything else which we cannot define.
The sort of poetry I seek only resides in objects Man can't touch - like England 's grass network of lanes 100 years ago, but today he can destroy them and only Lord Farrer keeps him from doing it.
Freedom does not guarantee masterpieces.
It comes to this then: there always have been people like me and always will be, and generally they have been persecuted.
The middle age of buggers is not to be contemplated without horror.
No disease of the imagination is so difficult to cure, as that which is complicated with the dread of guilt : fancy and conscience then act interchangeably upon us, and so often shift their places, that the illusions of one are not distinguished from the dictates of the other.
Life - No, I've nothing to teach you about it for the moment. May be writing about it another week.
A facade of skyscrapers facing a lake and behind the facade, every type of dubiousness.
Chess is a forcing house where the fruits of character can ripen more fully than in life
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