People fear what they do not understand.
The essence of success is that it is never necessary to think of a new idea oneself. It is far better to wait until somebody else does it, and then to copy him in every detail, except his mistakes.
That is the whole trouble with being a heretic. One usually must think out everything for oneself.
It is a mark of genius not to astonish but to be astonished.
Fate is something you believe in when things are not going well. When they are, you forget it.
The poor have no business with culture and should beware of it. They cannot eat it; they cannot sell it; they can only pass it on to others and that is why the world is full of hungry people ready to teach us anything under the sun.
With thought, with the ideal, is immortal hilarity, the rose of joy. Round it all the muses sing.
This Vladimir Brusiloff to whom I have referred was the famous Russian novelist. . . . Vladimir specialized in gray studies of hopeless misery, where nothing happened till page three hundred and eighty, when the moujik decided to commit suicide. . . . Cuthbert was an optimist at heart, and it seemed to him that, at the rate at which the inhabitants of that interesting country were murdering one another, the supply of Russian novelists must eventually give out.
Writers, at least writers of fiction, are always full of anxiety and worry.
The writer - more especially the novelist - who has not, at one moment or another, considered his publisher unworthy of him, has still to be conceived.