Adam and Eve are like imaginary numbers, like the square root of minus one... If you include it in your equation, you can calculate all manners of things, which cannot be imagined without it.

What I do say is that I can write verse, and that the writing of verse in strict form is the best possible training for writing good prose.

That's the duty of the old, to be anxious on behalf of the young. And the duty of the young is to scorn the anxiety of the old.

I have maintained a passionate interest in education, which leads me occasionally to make foolish and ill-considered remarks alleging that not everything is well in our schools.

We don't need lists of rights and wrongs, tables of do's and don'ts: we need books, time, and silence. Thou shalt not is soon forgotten, but Once upon a time lasts forever.

What I couldn't help noticing was that I learned more about the novel in a morning by trying to write a page of one than I'd learned in seven years or so of trying to write criticism.

Being in love was like China: you knew it was there, and no doubt it was very interesting, and some people went there, but I never would. I'd spend all my life without ever going to China, but it wouldn't matter, because there was all the rest of the world to visit.

And before I'd got to the end of the first paragraph, I'd come up slap bang against a fundamental problem that still troubles me today whenever I begin a story, and it's this: where am I telling it from?

I had passed through the entire British education system studying literature, culminating in three years of reading English at Oxford, and they'd never told me about something as basic as the importance of point of view in fiction!

For that reason you can't write with music playing, and anyone who says he can is either writing badly, or not listening to the music, or lying. You need to hear what you're writing, and for that you need silence.

True education flowers at the point when delight falls in love with responsibility.

Argue with anything else, but don't argue with your own nature.

For a long time I thought I was a poet, but that's a high title to claim.

One curious thing about growing up is that you don't only move forward in time; you move backwards as well, as pieces of your parents' and grandparents' lives come to you.

Men pass in front of our eyes like butterflies, creatures of a brief season. We love them; they are brave, proud, beautiful, clever; and they die almost at once. They die so soon that our hearts are continually racked with pain.

If you can't think of what to write, tough luck; write anyway. If you can think of lots more when you've finished the three pages, don't write it; it'll be that much easier to get going next day.

My only real claim to anyone's attention lies in my writing.

Everything has a meaning, if only we could read it.

Adam and Eve are like imaginary numbers, like the square root of minus one... If you include it in your equation, you can calculate all manners of things, which cannot be imagined without it.

You'll drift apart, it's true, but you'll be out in the open, part of everything alive again.

Being a practiced liar doesnt mean you have a powerful imagination. Many good liars have no imagination at all its that which gives their lies such wide eyed conviction.

All good things pass away.

People are too complicated to have simple labels.

A lot of modernism does seem to come out of a fear of being thought an ordinary storyteller. So they tell it backwards and they tell it in the present tense and they cut loose the pages and shuffle them around - all that kind of stuff.

After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.

There are some themes, some subjects, too large for adult fiction; they can only be dealt with adequately in a children's book.

Men and women are moved by tides much fiercer than you can imagine, and they sweep us all up into the current.

No advance in wealth, no softening of manners, no reform or revolution has ever brought human equality a millimeter nearer.

Indeed, Miss Manners has come to believe that the basic political division in this country is not between liberals and conservatives but between those who believe that they should have a say in the love lives of strangers and those who do not.

Be simple in words, manners, and gestures. Amuse as well as instruct. If you can make a man laugh, you can make him think and make him like and believe you.

You come before me this morning with clean hands and clean collars. I want you to have clean tongues, clean manners, clean morals and clean characters.

To the real artist in humanity, what are called bad manners are often the most picturesque and significant of all.

An armed society is a polite society. Manners are good when one may have to back up his acts with his life.

Equality is the public recognition, effectively expressed in institutions and manners, of the principle that an equal degree of attention is due to the needs of all human beings.

Nothing is so great an example of bad manners as flattery. If you flatter all the company, you please none; If you flatter only one or two, you offend the rest.

Manners are love in a cool climate.

Friends and good manners will carry you where money won't go.

The progress of the American Revolution has been so rapid and such the alteration of manners, the blending of characters, and the new train of ideas that almost universally prevail, that the principles which animated to the noblest exertions have been nearly annihilated.

Simplicity in character, in manners, in style; in all things the supreme excellence is simplicity.

I differ materially from Capt. Lewis, in my account of the numbers, manners, and morals of the Sioux.

Writers of novels and romance in general bring a double loss to their readers; robbing them of their time and money; representing men, manners, and things, that never have been, or are likely to be.

To Americans, English manners are far more frightening than none at all.

Opinions alter, manners change, creeds rise and fall, but the moral laws are written on the table of eternity.

Persian social manners are well known, and there is no other society that can compete with them.

In marriage there are no manners to keep up, and beneath the wildest accusations no real criticism. Each is familiar with that ancient child in the other who may erupt again. We are not ridiculous to ourselves. We are ageless. That is the luxury of the wedding ring.

Good manners sometimes means simply putting up with other people's bad manners.

Respect for ourselves guides our morals, respect for others guides our manners.

Good manners is the art of making those people easy with whom we converse. Whoever makes the fewest people uneasy is the best bred in the room.

I think to be oversensitive about cliches is like being oversensitive about table manners.