"The present is the necessary product of all the past, the necessary cause of all the future"

"Henry James seems most entirely in his element, doing that is to say what everything favors his doing, when it is a question of recollection. The mellow light which swims over the past, the beauty which suffuses even the commonest little figures of that"

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

"Now, aged 50, I'm just poised to shoot forth quite free straight and undeflected my bolts whatever they are."

"If we didn't live venturously, plucking the wild goat by the beard, and trembling over precipices, we should never be depressed, I've no doubt; but already should be faded, fatalistic and aged"

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

"The older one grows, the more one likes indecency."

"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."

"Arrange whatever pieces come your way."

"For what Harley Street specialist has time to understand the body, let alone the mind or both in combination, when he is a slave to thirteen thousand a year?"

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

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

"Nothing has really happened until it has been recorded."

"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."

"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."

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

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

"Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by heart and his friends can only read the title."

"Boredom is the legitimate kingdom of the philanthropic."

"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."

"Indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman."

"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?"

"Somewhere, everywhere, now hidden, now apparent in what ever is written down, is the form of a human being. If we seek to know him, are we idly occupied?"

"We all indulge in the strange, pleasant process called thinking, but when it comes to saying, even to someone opposite, what we think, then how little we are able to convey! The phantom is through the mind and out of the window before we can lay salt on"