“He is every other inch a gentleman.”
“Motherhood is the strangest thing, it can be like being one's own Trojan horse.”
“Any authentic work of art must start an argument between the artist and his audience.”
“The main difference between men and woman is that men are lunatics and woman are idiots.”
“But there are other things than dissipation that thicken the features. Tears, for example.”
“Most works of art, like most wines, ought to be consumed in the district of their fabrication.”
“There is no such thing as conversation. It is an illusion. There are intersecting monologues, that is all.”
“People call me feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or a prostitute.”
“All men should have a drop of treason in their veins, if nations are not to go soft like so many sleepy pears.”
“I wonder if we are all wrong about each other, if we are just composing unwritten novels about the people we meet?”
“There is no wider gulf in the universe than yawns between those on the hither and thither side of vital experience.”
“She saw she had fallen into the hands of one of those doctors who have strayed too far from apparent in the direction of the soul.”
“We all drew on the comfort which is given out by the major works of Mozart, which is as real and material as the warmth given up by a glass of brandy.”
“All good biography, as all good fiction, comes down to the study of original sin, of our inherent disposition to choose death when we ought to choose life.”
“Just how difficult it is to write biography can be reckoned by anybody who sits down and considers just how many people know the real truth about his or her love affairs.”
“Everyone realizes that one can believe little of what people say about each other. But it is not so widely realized that even less can one trust what people say about themselves.”
“Now different races and nationalities cherish different ideals of society that stink in each other's nostrils with an offensiveness beyond the power of any but the most monstrous private deed.”
“In England and America a beard usually means that its owner would rather be considered venerable than virile; on the continent of Europe it often means that its owner makes a special claim to virility.”
“Men must be capable of imagining and executing and insisting on social change if they are to reform or even maintain civilization, and capable too of furnishing the rebellion which is sometimes necessary if society is not to perish of immobility.”