Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Irony differentiates. Cynicism never does.
It is always edifying for mortals to look at a god.
He who fears to be out of the mode does not deserve to belong to himself.
The true artist is never afraid of anything - including the glories of the past.
There is hardly a person alive who does not want to know 'what happened next,' in any context.
In many joyfully-admired recent novels, love appears as little more than sex-manual instruction.
Everybody is a regionalist. Tolstoy is a regionalist - one is where one lives, where one writes.
A reason that the past is so hated by the young is that there is no way to be entirely free of it.
The most important sentence in a good book is the first one; it will contain the organic seed from which all that follows will grow.
Everybody around me was talented and gave everybody talent. Everybody painted. My mother had a beautiful voice. My father was a marvelous drawing-room actor.
The most valuable writers are those in whom we find not themselves, or ourselves, or the fugitive era of their lifetimes, but the common vision of all times.
King Charles, who was also the Holy Roman Emperor, lived and worked in hard bare rooms with no carpets, crowding to the fire in winter, using the window's sunshine in summer.
There is a difference between dramatizing your sensibility and your personality. The literary works which we think of as classicsdid the former. Much modern writing does the latter, and so has an affinity with, say, night-club acts in all their shoddy immediacy.