"Odd how the creative power at once brings the whole universe to order."

"Yet, it is true, poetry is delicious; the best prose is that which is most full of poetry."

"Where the Mind is biggest, the Heart, the Senses, Magnanimity, Charity, Tolerance, Kindliness, and the rest of them scarcely have room to breathe."

"Somewhere, everywhere, now hidden, now apparent in what ever is written down, is the form of a human being. If we seek to know him, are we idly occupied?"

"One has to secrete a jelly in which to slip quotations down people's throats - and one always secretes too much jelly."

"Mental fight means thinking against the current, not with it. It is our business to puncture gas bags and discover the seeds of truth."

"Nothing has really happened until it has been recorded."

"When the shriveled skin of the ordinary is stuffed out with meaning, it satisfies the senses amazingly."

"A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction."

"If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people."

"It is far more difficult to murder a phantom than a reality."

"Almost any biographer, if he respects facts, can give us much more than another fact to add to our collection. He can give us the creative fact; the fertile fact; the fact that suggests and engenders."

"Thought and theory must precede all salutary action; yet action is nobler in itself than either thought or theory."

"We are nauseated by the sight of trivial personalities decomposing in the eternity of print."

"It's not catastrophes, murders, deaths, diseases, that age and kill us; it's the way people look and laugh, and run up the steps of omnibuses."

"This is not writing at all. Indeed, I could say that Shakespeare surpasses literature altogether, if I knew what I meant."

"I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don't have complete emotions about the present, only about the past."

"Masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice."

"I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse, perhaps, to be locked in."

"The truth is, I often like women. I like their unconventionality. I like their completeness. I like their anonymity."

"Boredom is the legitimate kingdom of the philanthropic."

"I was in a queer mood, thinking myself very old: but now I am a woman again - as I always am when I write."

"It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple: one must be a woman manly, or a man womanly."

"We can best help you to prevent war not by repeating your words and following your methods but by finding new words and creating new methods."

"Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others."

"These are the soul's changes. I don't believe in ageing. I believe in forever altering one's aspect to the sun. Hence my optimism."

"One of the signs of passing youth is the birth of a sense of fellowship with other human beings as we take our place among them."

"Who shall measure the hat and violence of the poet's heart when caught and tangled in a woman's body?"

"It is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top."

"It seems as if an age of genius must be succeeded by an age of endeavour; riot and extravagance by cleanliness and hard work."

"It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality."

"The beauty of the world, which is so soon to perish, has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder."

"If you insist upon fighting to protect me, or 'our' country, let it be understood soberly and rationally between us that you are fighting to gratify a sex instinct which I cannot share; to procure benefits where I have not shared and probably will not share."

"To enjoy freedom we have to control ourselves."

"I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman."

"Rigid, the skeleton of habit alone upholds the human frame."

"There can be no two opinions as to what a highbrow is. He is the man or woman of thoroughbred intelligence who rides his mind at a gallop across country in pursuit of an idea."

"Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by his heart, and his friends can only read the title."

"Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends."

"Someone has to die in order that the rest of us should value life more."

"Language is wine upon the lips."

"I want the concentration and the romance, and the worlds all glued together, fused, glowing: have no time to waste any more on prose."

"The telephone, which interrupts the most serious conversations and cuts short the most weighty observations, has a romance of its own."

"There is much to support the view that it is clothes that wear us, and not we, them; we may make them take the mould of arm or breast, but they mould our hearts, our brains, our tongues to their liking."

"The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages."

"Sleep, that deplorable curtailment of the joy of life."

"You send a boy to school in order to make friends - the right sort."

"As a woman I have no country. As a woman my country is the whole world."

"For what Harley Street specialist has time to understand the body, let alone the mind or both in combination, when he is a slave to thirteen thousand a year?"

"Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so slightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible."