Laugh and the world laughs with you, snore and you sleep alone. |
Life is a wretched gray Saturday, but it has to be lived through. |
Novelists are perhaps the last people in the world to be entrusted with opinions. The nature of a novel is that it has no opinions, only the dialectic of contrary views, some of which, all of which, may be untenable and even silly. A novelist should not be too intelligent either, although he may be permitted to be an intellectual. |
One of the delights known to age, and beyond the grasp of youth, is that of Not Going. |
Readers are plentiful: thinkers are rare. |
The adult relation to books is one of absorbing rather than being absorbed |
The aura of the theocratic death penalty for adultery still clings to America, even outside New England, and multiple divorce, which looks to the European like serial polygamy, is the moral solution to the problem of the itch. |
The country needs and, unless I mistake its temper, the country demands bold, persistent, experimentation. It is common sense to take a method and try it, if it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something. |
The downtrodden, who are the great creators of slang. |
The possession of a book becomes a substitute for reading it. |
The trouble began with Forster. After him it was considered ungentlemanly to write more than five or six novels. |
The unconscious mind has a habit of asserting itself in the afternoon. |
There is lots of scope for European banking deals. |
To write is to become disinterested. There is a certain renunciation in art. |
Violence among young people is an aspect of their desire to create. They don't know how to use their energy creatively so they do the opposite and destroy. |