Much effort, much prosperity.
Knowledge helps only when it descends into habits.
There is no such thing as a homosexual or a heterosexual person. There are only homo- or heterosexual acts. Most people are a mixture of impulses if not practices.
The safest road to hell is the gradual one - the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.
It is now only in letters I write what I feel: not in literature any more, and I seldom say it, because I keep trying to be amusing.
Great literature cannot grow from a neglected or impoverished soil. Only if we actually tend or care will it transpire that every hundred years or so we might get a Middlemarch.
No one who loves life can ignore literature, and no one who loves literature can ignore life.
Nobody knows anything about Shakespeare the person. It's all legend, it is all rumor.
Good is often the enemy of best.
Random violence is incredibly infectious
To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee, One clover, and a bee, And revery. The revery alone will do, If bees are few.
In my view the time for rousing revolutionary literature has passed, because the revolution has already revolutionised itself to death and has left behind only bitterness and a sort of weariness, listlessness and even nausea.
In general, in poetry and literature, I am among those people who believe that too much is indispensable.
Although native Africans domesticated some plants in the Sahel and in Ethiopia and in tropical West Africa, they acquired valuable domestic animals only later, from the north.
I would rather do a good hours work weeding than write two pages of my best; nothing is so interesting as weeding. I went crazy over the outdoor work, and at last had to confine myself to the house, or literature must have gone by the board.
Literature gives us the great gift of the present moment.
The man who sows wrong thoughts and deeds and prays that God will bless him is in the position of a farmer who, having sown tares, asks God to bring forth for him a harvest of wheat.
As if paralyzed by the national fear of ideas, the democratic distrust of whatever strikes beneath the prevailing platitudes, it evades all resolute and honest dealing with what, after all, must be every healthy literature's elementary materials.
Our true nature is free of any and all notions of gender, of any notions of difference whatsoever.
When a man bores a woman, she complains. When a woman bores a man, he ignores her.