“Death destroys a man, but the idea of death saves him.”

I am sure that if the mothers of various nations could meet, there would be no more wars.

We move between two darknesses.

Adventures do occur, but not punctually.

Works of art, in my opinion, are the only objects in the material universe to possess internal order, and that is why, though I don’t believe that only art matters, I do believe in Art for Art’s sake.

I have only got down on to paper, really, three types of people: the person I think I am, the people who irritate me, and the people I’d like to be.

So I shan’t ever marry, for there aren’t such men. And Heaven help any one whom I do marry, for I shall certainly run away from him before you can say ‘Jack Robinson.

There is an aristocracy of the sensitive. They represent the true human tradition of permanent victory over cruelty and chaos.

Mistrust all enterprises that require new clothes.

I won’t be protected. I will choose for myself what is ladylike and right. To shield me is an insult.

The kingdom of music is not the kingdom of this world; it will accept those whom breeding and intellect and culture have alike rejected.

Outside the arch, always there seemed another arch. And beyond the remotest echo, a silence.

Spoon feeding in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon.

Do we find happiness so often that we should turn it off the box when it happens to sit there?

The people I respect most behave as if they were immortal and as if society was eternal.

School was the unhappiest time of my life and the worst trick it ever played on me was to pretend that it was the world in miniature. For it hindered me from discovering how lovely and delightful and kind the world can be, and how much of it is intelligible.

Give, do not lend; after death who will thank you?

The 20th century was a test bed for big ideas – fascism, communism, the atomic bomb.

I subscribe to the idea that personality is like a muscle.

Like the idea that every night might be the night before the world ends.

Men die but an idea does not.

You start reverting back to that state of mind where you’re having conversations with yourself, and that’s where the weirdest and most honest ideas come from.

I can’t pretend that I don’t subscribe to Internet music culture in that I discover new music and old music simultaneously.

In fiction writing ideas have to be handled extremely carefully.

Java and C++ make you think that the new ideas are like the old ones.