People call me a feminist whenever I express statements that distinguish me from a doormat.
To be afraid of sorrow is to be afraid of joy also.
Motherhood is the strangest thing, it can be like being one's own Trojan horse.
Life ought to be a struggle of desire toward adventures whose nobility will fertilize the soul.
Any authentic work of art must start an argument between the artist and his audience.
Now I recall my emotions at that moment, children seem to me a remarkable race. They want so much to murder so many people, and they so rarely murder anybody at all.
I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is: I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat.
The world is round and the place which may seem like the end may also be only the beginning.
There is no logical reason why the camel of great art should pass through the needle of mob intelligence.
Writing has nothing to do with communication between person and person, only with communication between different parts of a person's mind.
Journalism: an ability to meet the challenge of filling the space.
Great music is in a sense serene it is certain of the values it asserts.
Nothing succeeds like failure.
[On Jane Austen] She was fully possessed of the idealism which is a necessary ingredient of the great satirist. If she criticized the institutions of earth, it was because she had very definite ideas...
The main difference between men and women is that men are lunatics and women are idiots.
It is the soul's duty to be loyal to its own desires.
Before a war military science seems a real science, like astronomy but after a war it seems more like astrology.
It is sometimes very hard to tell the difference between history and the smell of skunk.
I take it as a prime cause of the present confusion of society that it is too sickly and too doubtful to use pleasure as a test of value.
There is a definite process by which one made people into friends and it involved talking to them and listening to them for hours at a time.
