“Use no superfluous word, no adjective, which does not reveal something.”

Literature is news that stays news.

The temple is holy because it is not for sale.

Come, let us pity those who are better off than we are. Come, my friend, and remember that the rich have butlers and no friends, And we have friends and no butlers.

I found after seventy years that I was not a lunatic but a moron, I should have been able to do better.

Technique is the test of sincerity.

Until you know who has lent what to whom, you know nothing whatever of politics, you know nothing whatever of history, you know nothing of international wrangles.

Use no word that under stress of emotion you could not actually say.

The act of bell ringing is symbolic of all proselytizing religions. It implies the pointless interference with the quiet of other people.

Anyone who is too lazy to master the comparatively small glossary necessary to understand Chaucer deserves to be shut out from the reading of good books forever.

Every great change is simple.

What thou lovest well remains, the rest is dross What thou lov’st well shall not be reft from thee What thou lov’st well is thy true heritage.

Wars are made to make debt.

A man of genius has a right to any mode of expression.

There is natural ignorance and there is artificial ignorance. I should say at the present moment the artificial ignorance is about eighty-five per cent.

If a patron buys from an artist who needs money (needs money to buy tools, time, food), the patron then makes himself equal to the artist; he is building art into the world; he creates.

If a nation’s literature declines, the nation atrophies and decays.

I was a little excited but mostly blorft. “Blorft” is an adjective I just made up that means ‘Completely overwhelmed but proceeding as if everything is fine and reacting to the stress with the torpor of a possum.’ I have been blorft every day for the past seven years.

Adjectives are the sugar of literature and adverbs the salt.

Cuisine has become too complicated – this is about subject, verb, adjective: duck, turnips, sauce.

Whatever you want to say, there is only one word to express it, only one verb to give it movement, only one adjective to qualify it.

The adjective ‘decent’ and the noun ‘government’ have seldom come together in the human history!

Diseases, as all experience shows, are adjectives, not noun substantives.

Death to all modifiers, he declared one day, and out of every letter that passed through his hands went every adverb and every adjective.