Authors like cats because they are such quiet, lovable, wise creatures, and cats like authors for the same reasons.
A truly great book should be read in youth, again in maturity and once more in old age, as a fine building should be seen by morning light, at noon and by moonlight.
Sexual thrills are not all physical, and although Parlabane was an unlikely seducer, even on the intellectual plane, it was clear that his desire was, by this prolonged tickling, to bring me to an org...
Canada was settled in the main by people with a lower middle-class outlook and a respect rather than an affectionate familiarity for the things of the mind.
Whether you are really right or not doesn't matter it's the belief that counts.
The love of truth lies at the root of much humour.
If a man wants to be of the greatest possible value to his fellow-creatures let him begin the long solitary task of perfecting himself.
They were untouched by modern education, but their government was striving with might and main to procure this inestimable benefit for them; anticlericalism and American bustle would soon free them fr...
The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend.
But what I knew then was that nobody-- not even my mother-- was to be trusted in a strange world that showed very little of itself on the surface.
I do not 'get' ideas ideas get me.
Their very conservatism is secondhand, and they don't know what they are conserving.
There is no nonsense so gross that society will not, at some time, make a doctrine of it and defend it with every weapon of communal stupidity.
The world is full of people whose notion of a satisfactory future is, in fact, a return to the idealised past.
If we seek the pleasures of love passion should be occasional and common sense continual.
Words are just farts from a lot of fools who have swallowed too many books.
I shall be as brief as I can, for it is not by piling up detail that I hope to achieve my picture, but by putting the emphasis where I think it belongs.
Are you New World or Old?''Sounds like a novel by Henry James.''Never read him.''Don't. But that was his question and he plumped for the Old.
The critic is the duenna in the passionate affair between playwrights actors and audiences - a figure dreaded and occasionally comic but never welcome never loved.
Men who look young act young and everlastingly harp on the fact that they are young-but who nevertheless think and act with a degree of caution what would be excessive in their grandfathers-are the...