music is a missionary effort to colonize earth for imperialistic heaven..

I don't believe that to understand is necessarily to pardon, but I feel that to understand makes one forget that one cannot pardon..

It isn't only living people who die, it is great stretches of living, which can die even when the people who lived there still exist..

Writers on the subject of August Strindberg have hitherto omitted to mention that he could not write. ... Strindberg, who was neither a good nor a wi….

It is sometimes very hard to tell the difference between history and the smell of skunk..

[Evelyn Waugh] made drunkenness cute and chic, and then took to religion, simply to have the most expensive carpet of all to be sick on..

Neurotics, who cause less distress to themselves and their neighbours than those in the other category, are at war with their own natures. Their righ….

Olive Schreiner is less a woman than a geographical fact. Just as one thinks of Egypt as a foreground for the Pyramids, so South Africa seems the set….

the bad is more easily perceived than the good. A fresh lobster does not give such pleasure to the consumer as a stale one will give him pain..

Any writer worth his salt knows that only a small proportion of literature does nore than partly compensate people for the damage they have suffered ….

There is a point, and it is reached more easily than is supposed, where interference with freedom of the arts and literature becomes an attack on the….

The trouble about man is twofold. He cannot learn truths which are too complicated; he forgets truths which are too simple..

There was a definite process by which one made people into friends, and it involved talking to them and listening to them for hours at a time..

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….

There is no logical reason why the camel of great art should pass through the needle of mob intelligence..

If the poor ever feel poor as the rich do, we will have a most bloody revolution..

Charity is an ugly trick. It is a virtue grown by the rich on the graves of the poor. Unless it is accompanied by sincere revolt against the present ….

All disgrace smells alike. Differences in ruin are only matters of degree..

Any authentic work of art must start an argument between the artist and his audience..

Women know the damnation of charity because the habit of civilization has always been to throw them cheap alms rather than give them good wages..

An audience proves its discipline by its capacity for stillness. Those who have never practiced continuous application to an exacting process cannot ….