“When you forget to eat, you know you’re alive.”

I have performed the necessary butchery. Here is the bleeding corpse.

Criticism talks a good deal of nonsense, but even its nonsense is a useful force. It keeps the question of art before the world, insists upon its importance.

All intimacies are based on differences.

Three things in human life are important. The first is to be kind. The second is to be kind. And the third is to be kind.

If this was love, love had been overrated.

To take what there is in life and use it, without waiting forever in vain for the preconceived, to dig deep into the actual and get something out of that; this, doubtless, is the right way to live.

To establish in fine a relation with the criticized thing and to make it one’s own.

Make the short story tremendously succinct – with a very short pulse or rhythm – and the closest selection of detail.

Don’t pass it by – the immediate, the real, the ours, the yours, the novelist’s that it waits for.

Do not mind anything that anyone tells you about anyone else.

There were several ways of understanding her: there was what she said, and there was what she meant, and there was something between the two, that was neither.

Cats and monkeys; monkeys and cats; all human life is there.

Deep experience is never peaceful.

Money’s a horrid thing to follow, but a charming thing to meet.

It’s never permitted to be surprised at the aberrations of born fools.

Her imagination was by habit ridiculously active; when the door was not open it jumped out the window.

A longer memory, and a sterner sense of justice than we do.

I do quite like that Andrew Lloyd Webber song from ‘Cats.’ What’s it called? ‘Memory?’ Sends shivers up your spine.

To be a liar, you’ve got to have a great memory, and I don’t have a memory.

Nothing fixes a thing so intensely in the memory as the wish to forget it.

Unless a man feels he has a good enough memory, he should never venture to lie.

We only labor to stuff the memory, and leave the conscience and the understanding unfurnished and void.

A great city, whose image dwells in the memory of man, is the type of some great idea. Rome represents conquest;

I’ve a grand memory for forgetting.