“Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.”

“Truth, of course, must of necessity be stranger than fiction, for we have made fiction to suit ourselves.”

“In one sense at any rate it is more valuable to read bad literature than good literature. Good literature may tell us the mind of one man but bad literature may tell us the mind of many men.”

“Truth must necessarily be stranger than fiction; for fiction is the creation of the human mind and therefore congenial to it.”

“Classic literature is still something that hangs in the air like a song.”

“People wonder why the novel is the most popular form of literature; people wonder why it is read more than books of science or books of metaphysics. The reason is very simple; it is merely that the novel is more true than they are.”

“Nothing is important except the fate of the soul; and literature is only redeemed from an utter triviality ... by the fact that it describes not the world around us, or the things on the retina of the eye, or the enormous irrelevancy of encyclopedias, but some condition to which the human spirit can come.”