It is impossible to foretell the future with any degree of accuracy, that it is impossible to rehearse life. A fault in the scenery, a face in the audience, an interruption of the audience on to the stage, and all our carefully planned gesture mean nothing, or mean too much.
All this fame and money, which have so thrilled me when they came to others, leave me cold when they come to me. I am not an ascetic, but I don't know what to do with them, and my daily life has never been so trying, and there is no one to fill it emotionally.
What is the good of your stars and trees, your sunrise and the wind, if they do not enter into our daily lives? They have never entered into mine, but into yours, we thought--Haven't we all to struggle against life's daily greyness, against pettiness, against mechanical cheerfulness, against suspicion? I struggle by remembering my friends; others I have known by remembering some place--some beloved place or tree--we thought you one of these.
No one is more triumphant than the man who chooses a worthy subject and masters all its facts.
Just as words have two functions - information and creation - so each human mind has two personalities, one on the surface, one deeper down. The upper personality... is conscious and alert... The lower personality is a... perfect fool, but without it there is no literature.
The work of art assumes the existence of the perfect spectator, and is indifferent to the fact that no such person exists.
He doesn't want you to be real, and to think and to live. He doesn't love you. But I love you. I want you to have your own thoughts and ideas and feelings, even when I hold you in my arms.
Human beings have their great chance in the novel.
When that strange race nears the dust and is condemned as untouchable, then nature remembers the physical perfection that she accomplished elsewhere, and throws out a god-not many, but one here and there, to prove to society how little its categories impress her.
Reverence is fatal to literature.
If human nature does alter it will be because individuals manage to look at themselves in a new way. Here and there people - a very few people, but a few novelists are among them - are trying to do this. Every institution and vested interest in against such a search: organized religion, the state, the family in its economic aspect, have nothing to gain, and it is only when outward prohibitions weaken that it can proceed: history conditions it to that extent.
I have always found writing pleasant and don't understand what people mean by 'throes of creation.'
She must be assured that it is not a criminal offense to love at first sight.
Passion does not blind. No. Passion is sanity, and the woman you love, she is the only person you will ever really understand.
I do like Christmas on the whole.... In its clumsy way, it does approach Peace and Goodwill. But it is clumsier every year.
Life's very difficult and full of surprises. At all events, I've got as far as that. To be humble and kind, to go straight ahead, to love people rather than pity them, to remember the submerged - well, one can't do all these things at once, worse luck, because they're so contradictory. It's then that proportion comes in - to live by proportion. Don't begin with proportion. Only prigs do that. Let proportion come in as a last resource, when the better things have failed.
Freedom does not guarantee masterpieces.
The more highly public life is organized the lower does its morality sink.
There is something majestic in the bad taste of Italy.
I won't be protected. I will choose for myself what is ladylike and right. To shield me is an insult.
It is the vice of a vulgar mind to be thrilled by bigness.
If Miss Honeychurch ever takes to live as she plays, it will be very exciting--both for us and for her.
There lies at the back of every creed something terrible and hard for which the worshipper may one day be required to suffer.
The sort of poetry I seek only resides in objects Man can't touch - like England 's grass network of lanes 100 years ago, but today he can destroy them and only Lord Farrer keeps him from doing it.
Do we find happiness so often that we should turn it off the box when it happens to sit there?
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