“The artist is always beginning. Any work of art which is not a beginning, an invention, a discovery is of little worth.”

Literature does not exist in a vacuum. Writers as such have a definite social function exactly proportional to their ability as writers. This is their main use.

Genius is the capacity to see ten things where the ordinary man sees one, and the man of talent sees two or three, plus the ability to register that multiple perception in the material of his art.

Bureaucrats are a pox. They are supposed to be necessary. Certain chemicals in the body are supposed to be necessary to life, but cause death the moment they increase beyond a suitable limit.

A great age of literature is perhaps always a great age of translations.

The curse of me and my nation is that we always think things can be bettered by immediate action of some sort, any sort rather than no sort.

All great art is born of the metropolis.

Learn of the green world what can be thy place In scaled invention or true artistry.

A little light, like a rushlight to lead back to splendour.

The secret of popular writing is never to put more on a given page than the common reader can lap off it with no strain whatsoever on his habitually slack attention.

A people that grows accustomed to sloppy writing is a people in the process of losing grip on its empire and on itself.

The modern artist must live by craft and violence. His gods are violent gods. Those artists, so called, whose work does not show this strife, are uninteresting.

This is no book. Whoever touches this touches a man.

Religion I have defined as “Another of those numerous failures resulting from an attempt to popularize art”.

The natural object is always the adequate symbol.

Democracy is now currently defined in Europe as a ‘country run by Jews,’

Literature is news that stays news.