“The fatal futility of Fact.”
“Ideas are, in truth, force.”
“In art economy is always beauty.”
“Deep experience is never peaceful.”
“The terrible fluidity of self-revelation.”
“The time-honored bread-sauce of the happy ending.”
“I think patriotism is like charity -- it begins at home.”
“Cats and monkeys; monkeys and cats; all human life is there.”
“To read between the lines was easier than to follow the text.”
“Money's a horrid thing to follow, but a charming thing to meet.”
“It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.”
“Which of you with taking thought can add to his stature one cubit?”
“In museums and palaces we are alternate radicals and conservatives.”
“I hold any writer sufficiently justified who is himself in love with his theme.”
“She had an unequalled gift... of squeezing big mistakes into small opportunities.”
“The only reason for the existence of a novel is that it does attempt to represent life.”
“Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact.”
“Though there are some disagreeable things in Venice there is nothing so disagreeable as the visitors.”
“What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character?”
“Do not mind anything that anyone tells you about anyone else. Judge everyone and everything for yourself.”
“A man who pretends to understand women is ad manners. For him to really to understand them is bad morals.”
“The superiority of one man's opinion over another's is never so great as when the opinion is about a woman.”
“Of course you're always at liberty to judge the critic. Judge people as critics, however, and you'll condemn them all!”
“Summer afternoon -- summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.”
“Three things in human life are important. The first is to be kind. The second is to be kind. And the third is to be kind.”
“If I were to live my life over again, I would be an American. I would steep myself in America, I would know no other land.”
“Under certain circumstances there are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea.”
“It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance and I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its process.”
“The only obligation to which in advance we may hold a novel, without incurring the accusation of being arbitrary, is that it be interesting.”
“I am blackly bored when they are at large and at work; but somehow I am still more blackly bored when they are shut up in Holloway and we are deprived of them.”