A masterpiece is something said once and for all, stated, finished, so that it's there complete in the mind, if only at the back.

If one could be friendly with women, what a pleasure - the relationship so secret and private compared with relations with men. Why not write about it truthfully?

It's not catastrophes, murders, deaths, diseases, that age and kill us; it's the way people look and laugh, and run up the steps of omnibuses.

I read the book of Job last night, I don't think God comes out well in it.

Sleep, that deplorable curtailment of the joy of life.

A good essay must have this permanent quality about it; it must draw its curtain round us, but it must be a curtain that shuts us in not out.

My own brain is to me the most unaccountable of machinery - always buzzing, humming, soaring roaring diving, and then buried in mud. And why? What's this passion for?

The connection between dress and war is not far to seek; your finest clothes are those you wear as soldiers.

It is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.

The poet gives us his essence, but prose takes the mold of the body and mind.

Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so slightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible.

It is the nature of the artist to mind excessively what is said about him. Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.

It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple: one must be a woman manly, or a man womanly.

One has to secrete a jelly in which to slip quotations down people's throats - and one always secretes too much jelly.

Great bodies of people are never responsible for what they do.

On the outskirts of every agony sits some observant fellow who points.

Nothing has really happened until it has been recorded.

One likes people much better when they're battered down by a prodigious siege of misfortune than when they triumph.

Odd how the creative power at once brings the whole universe to order.

These are the soul's changes. I don't believe in ageing. I believe in forever altering one's aspect to the sun. Hence my optimism.

Humor is the first of the gifts to perish in a foreign tongue.

Yet it is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.

I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse, perhaps, to be locked in.

This is not writing at all. Indeed, I could say that Shakespeare surpasses literature altogether, if I knew what I meant.

The telephone, which interrupts the most serious conversations and cuts short the most weighty observations, has a romance of its own.

To depend upon a profession is a less odious form of slavery than to depend upon a father.

This soul, or life within us, by no means agrees with the life outside us. If one has the courage to ask her what she thinks, she is always saying the very opposite to what other people say.

There is much to support the view that it is clothes that wear us, and not we, them; we may make them take the mould of arm or breast, but they mould our hearts, our brains, our tongues to their liking.

Yet, it is true, poetry is delicious; the best prose is that which is most full of poetry.

You cannot find peace by avoiding life.

Arrange whatever pieces come your way.

Almost any biographer, if he respects facts, can give us much more than another fact to add to our collection. He can give us the creative fact; the fertile fact; the fact that suggests and engenders.

Masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.

It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality.

Who shall measure the hat and violence of the poet's heart when caught and tangled in a woman's body?

It seems as if an age of genius must be succeeded by an age of endeavour; riot and extravagance by cleanliness and hard work.

We are nauseated by the sight of trivial personalities decomposing in the eternity of print.

Where the Mind is biggest, the Heart, the Senses, Magnanimity, Charity, Tolerance, Kindliness, and the rest of them scarcely have room to breathe.

I was in a queer mood, thinking myself very old: but now I am a woman again - as I always am when I write.

When the shriveled skin of the ordinary is stuffed out with meaning, it satisfies the senses amazingly.

Why are women... so much more interesting to men than men are to women?

If we help an educated man's daughter to go to Cambridge are we not forcing her to think not about education but about war? - not how she can learn, but how she can fight in order that she might win the same advantages as her brothers?

Let a man get up and say, Behold, this is the truth, and instantly I perceive a sandy cat filching a piece of fish in the background. Look, you have forgotten the cat, I say.

Rigid, the skeleton of habit alone upholds the human frame.

Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.

I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don't have complete emotions about the present, only about the past.

To enjoy freedom we have to control ourselves.

Someone has to die in order that the rest of us should value life more.

We can best help you to prevent war not by repeating your words and following your methods but by finding new words and creating new methods.