Speakers' nerves affect them in various ways. Some tremble, some become frenzied. I lose all confidence, and suffer from a leaden oppression that mak….

Women say . . . that if men had to have babies there would soon be no babies in the world. . . . I have sometimes wished that some clever man would a….

It is in this matter that I fall foul of so many American writers on writing; they seem to think that writing is a confidence game by means of which ….

Female beauty is an important Minor Sacrament which cannot be received too often; I am not at all sure that neglect of it does not constitute a sin o….

Like it or not, to reach middle age with less money or less prestige than our father had is somewhat to lose face. Stupid of course, when put like th….

If I had my way books would not be written in English but in an exceedingly difficult secret language.... This plan would have the advantage of scari….

Many a promising career has been wrecked by marrying the wrong sort of woman..

The people of the United States, perhaps more than any other nation in history, love to abase themselves and proclaim their unworthiness, and seem to….

Aristocrats need not be rich, but they must be free, and in the modern world freedom grows rarer the more we prate about it..

Pessimism is a very easy way out because it is a short view of life. If you look at what is happening around us today, you can't help but feel that l….

Book lovers are thought by unbookish people to be gentle and unworldly, and perhaps a few of them are so. But there are others who will lie and schem….

Let people alone. Let them find their way. Let them find their level and you may sometimes be delighted and astonished at the extraordinary high leve….

Their very conservatism is secondhand, and they don't know what they are conserving..

The best among our writers are doing their accustomed work of mirroring what is deep in the spirit of our time; if chaos appears in those mirrors, we….

That was what stuck in the craws of all the good women of Deptford: Mrs Dempster had not been raped, as a decent woman would have been-no, she had yi….

It used to be fashionable for authors to have their pictures taken with dogs, but the dogs always looked like models hired from an advertising agency….

I don't think I would ever write a book with what anybody could call pornography in it, because I feel that pornography is a cheat. It is an attempt ….

Real bibliophiles do not put their books on shelves for people to look at or handle. They have no desire to show off their darlings, or to amaze peop….

Celtic civilization was tribal, but by no means savage or uncultivated. People who regarded the theft of a harp from a bard as a crime second only to….

Of course, fairies are all imported in North America. We have no native fairies. The Little People do not long survive importation unless they go to ….

I have no skills with machines. I fear them, and because I cannot help attributing human qualities to them, I suspect that they hate me and will kill….