“In literature mere egotism is delightful.”

“Up to the present man has hardly cultivated sympathy at all. He has merely sympathy with pain, and sympathy with pain is not the highest form of sympathy. All sympathy is fine, but sympathy with suffering is the least fine mode. It is tainted with egotism. It is apt to become morbid. There is in it a certain element of terror for our own safety. We become afraid that we ourselves might be as the leper or as the blind, and that no man would have care of us. It is curiously limiting, too. One should sympathise with the entirety of life, not with life's sores and maladies merely, but with life's joy and beauty and energy and health and freedom.”

“The difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable and literature is not read.”

“Romantic literature is in effect imaginative lying.”

“The commonest thing is delightful if one only hides it.”

“Literature always anticipates life. It doesn't copy it but moulds it to it's purpose.”

“If a personality fascinates me, whatever mode of expression that personality selects is absolutely delightful to me.”