People do not deserve to have good writings; they are so pleased with the bad.

A good metaphor is something even the police should keep an eye on.

The greatest masterpiece in literature is only a dictionary out of order.

Literature could be said to be a sort of disciplined technique for arousing certain emotions.

If the most significant characteristic of man is the complex of biological needs he shares with all members of his species, then the best lives for the writer to observe are those in which the role of natural necessity is clearest, namely, the lives of the very poor.

The atmosphere of orthodoxy is always damaging to prose, and above all it is completely ruinous to the novel, the most anarchical of all forms of literature.

The last thing one discovers in composing a work is what to put first.

There is a great discovery still to be made in literature, that of paying literary men by the quantity they do not write.

What is not in the open street is false, derived, that is to say, literature.

Henry James seems most entirely in his element, doing that is to say what everything favors his doing, when it is a question of recollection. The mellow light which swims over the past, the beauty which suffuses even the commonest little figures of that