"Why did you look at the sunset?'Philip answered with his mouth full:Because I was happy."

"One can be very much in love with a woman without wishing to spend the rest of one's life with her."

"We do not write as we want but as we can."

"I have an idea that some men are born out of their due place. Accident has cast them amid certain surroundings, but they have always a nostalgia for a home they know not. They are strangers in their birthplace, and the leafy lanes they have known from childhood or the populous streets in which they have played, remain but a place of passage. They may spend their whole lives aliens among their kindred and remain aloof among the only scenes they have ever known. Perhaps it is this sense of strangeness that sends men far and wide in the search for something permanent, to which they may attach themselves. Perhaps some deep-rooted atavism urges the wanderer back to lands which his ancestors left in the dim beginnings of history."

"The last words he said to me when I bade him good-night were:Tell Amy it's no good coming after me. Anyhow, I shall change my hotel, so she wouldn't be able to find me.'My own impression is that she's well rid of you,' I said.My dear fellow, I only hope you'll be able to make her see it. But women are very unintelligent."

"I know that I shall die struggling for breath, and I know that I shall be horribly afraid. I know that I shall not be able to keep myself from regretting bitterly the life that has brought me to such a pass; but I disown that regret. I now, weak, old, diseased, poor, dying, hold still my soul in my hands, and I regret nothing."

"Every production of an artist should be the expression of an adventure of his soul."

"It's hard not to be impatient with the absurdity of the young; they tell us that two and two make four as though it had never occurred to us, and they're disappointed if we can't share their surprise when they have discovered that a hen lays an egg. There's a lot of nonsense in their ranting and raving, but it's not all nonsense. One ought to sympathize with them; one ought to do one's best to understand. One has to remember how much has to be forgotten and how much has to be learnt when for the first time one faces life. It's not very easy to give up one's ideals, and the brute facts of every day are bitter pills to swallow. The spiritual conflicts of adolescence can be very severe and one can do little to resolve them."

"The Americans, who are the most efficient people on the earth, have carried [phrase-making] to such a height of perfection and have invented so wide a range of pithy and hackneyed phrases that they can carry on an amusing and animated conversation without giving a moment's reflection to what they are saying and so leave their minds free to consider the more important matters of big business and fornication."

"You can do anything in this world if you are prepared to take the consequences."

"You can never know enough about your characters."

"For men, as a rule, love is but an episode which takes place among the other affairs of the day, and the emphasis laid on it in novels gives it an importance which is untrue to life. There are few men to whom it is the most important thing in the world, and they are not the very interesting ones; even women, with whom the subject is of paramount interest, have a contempt for them."

"It gives him spiritual freedom. To him life is a tragedy and by his gift of creation he enjoys the catharsis a purging of pity and terror, Which Aristotle tells is the object of art. Everything is transformed by his power into material and by writing it he can overcome it. Everything is grist to his mill. ... The artist is the only free man."

"Men seek but one thing in life - their pleasure."

"Passion is destructive. It destroyed Antony and Cleopatra, Tristan and Isolde, Parnell and Kitty O'Shea. And if it doesn't destroy it dies. It may be then that one is faced with the desolation of knowing that one has wasted the years of one's life, that one's brought disgrace upon oneself, endured the frightful pang of jealousy, swallowed every bitter mortification, that one's expended all one's tenderness, poured out all the riches of one's soul on a poor drab, a fool, a peg on which on hung one's dreams, who wasn't worth a stick of chewing gum."

"The artist produces for the liberation of his soul. It is his nature to create as it is the nature of water to run down the hill."

"But there are people who take salt with their coffee. They say it gives a tang, a savour, which is peculiar and fascinating. In the same way there are certain places, surrounded by a halo of romance, to which the inevitable disillusionment you experience on seeing them gives a singular spice. You had expected something wholly beautiful and you get an impression which is infinitely more complicated than any that beauty can give you. It is the weakness in the character of a great man which may make him less admirable but certainly more interesting. Nothing had prepared me for Honolulu..."

"Never pause unless you have a reason for it, but when you pause, pause as long as you can."

"Life isn't long enough for love and art."

"Beauty is an ecstacy it is as simple as hunger. There is really nothing to be said about it."

"Mrs. MacAndrew shared the common opinion of her sex that a man is always a brute to leave a woman who is attached to him, but that a woman is much to blame if he does."

"She says it's really not very flattering to her that the women who fall in love with her husband are so uncommonly second-rate."

"The great American novel has not only already been written, it has already been rejected."

"She gathered herself together. No one could describe the scorn of her expression or the contemptuous hatred she put into her answer. "You men! You filthy dirty pigs! You're all the same, all of you. Pigs! Pigs!"

"Some of us look for the Way in opium and some in God, some of us in whiskey and some in love. It is all the same Way and it leads nowhither."

"Kant thought things, not because they were true, but because he was Kant."

"As lovers, the difference between men and women is that women can love all day long, but men only at times."

"I've got no mother, no wife, no kids. I had, but my mother's dead, and I lost my wife and my kids when I had my trouble. Women are bitches. It's hard for a chap to live without any affection in his life."

"The tragedy of life is that sometimes we get what we want."

"You know what the critics are. If you tell the truth they only say you're cynical and it does an author no good to get a reputation for cynicism."

"He did not care upon what terms he satisfied his passion. He had even a mad, melodramatic idea to drug her."

"I will continue to write moral stories in rhymed couplets. But I should be thrice a fool if I did it for aught but my own entertainment."

"He did not care if she was heartless, vicious and vulgar, stupid and grasping, he loved her. He would rather have misery with one than happiness with the other."

"He was not crying for the pain they had caused him, nor for the humiliation he had suffered when they looked at his foot, but with rage at himself because, unable to stand the torture, he had put out his foot of his own accord."

"Old age is ready to undertake tasks that youth shirked because they would take too long."

"Women are constantly trying to commit suicide for love, but generally they take care not to succeed."

"Have common sense and stick to the point."

"Death is a very dull, dreary affair, and my advice to you is to have nothing whatsoever to do with it."

"Men have an extraordinarily erroneous opinion of their position in nature; and the error is ineradicable."

"He could breathe more freely in a lighter air. He was responsible only to himself for the things he did. Freedom! He was his own master at last. From old habit, unconsciously he thanked God that he no longer believed in Him."

"Dinner a time when . . . one should eat wisely but not too well and talk well but not too wisely."

"I know that you're selfish, selfish beyond words, and I know that you haven't the nerve of a rabbit, I know you're a liar and a humbug, I know that you're utterly contemptible. And the tragic part is'--her face was on a sudden distraught with pain--'the tragic part is that notwithstanding I love you with all my heart."

"I do not like these painted faces that look all alike; and I think women are foolish to dull their expression and obscure their personality with powder, rouge, and lipstick."

"To write simply is as difficult as to be good."

"The most difficult thing for a wise woman to do is to pretend to be a foolish one."

"He thought to himself that there could be no greater torture in the world than at the same time to love and to contemn."

"There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are."

"Beauty is something wonderful and strange that the artist fashions out of the chaos of the world in the torment of his soul. And when he has made it, it is not given to all to know it. To recognize it you must repeat the adventure of the artist. It is a melody that he sings to you, and to hear it again in your own heart you want knowledge and sensitiveness and imagination."

"I have an idea that the only thing which makes it possible to regard this world we live in without disgust is the beauty which now and then men create out of the chaos. The pictures they paint, the music they compose, the books they write, and the lives they lead. Of all these the richest in beauty is the beautiful life. That is the perfect work of art."

"I now, weak, old, diseased, poor, dying, hold still my soul in my hands, and I regret nothing."