Unless we remember we cannot understand.

Romance only dies with life. No pair of pincers will ever pull it out of us. But there is a spurious sentiment which cannot resist the unexpected and the incongruous and the grotesque.

People in a novel can be understood completely by the reader, if the novelist can be understood completely by the reader, if the novelist wishes; their inner as well as their outer life can be exposed.

To make us feel small in the right way is a function of art; men can only make us feel small in the wrong way.

If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.

The people I respect most behave as if they were immortal and as if society was eternal.

I suggest that the only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little farther down our particular path than we have yet got ourselves.

We are willing enough to praise freedom when she is safely tucked away in the past and cannot be a nuisance. In the present, amidst dangers whose outcome we cannot foresee, we get nervous about her, and admit censorship.

There lies at the back of every creed something terrible and hard for which the worshipper may one day be required to suffer.

A critic has no right to the narrowness which is the frequent prerogative of the creative artist.