If truth is a value it is because it is true and not because it is brave to speak it.

The drama is make-believe. It does not deal with truth but with effect.

The inclination to digress is human. But the dramatist must avoid it even more strenuously than the saint must avoid sin, for while sin may be venial, digression is mortal.

Failure makes people bitter and cruel. Success improves the character of the man.

So long as some are strong and some are weak, the weak will be driven to the wall.

There’s nothing the world loves more than a readymade description which they can hang on to a man, and so save themselves all trouble in future.

The prestige you acquire by being able to tell your friends that you know famous men proves only that you are yourself of small account.

In civilized communities men’s idiosyncrasies are mitigated by the necessity of conforming to certain rules of behaviour. Culture, is a mask that hides their faces.

Sentimentality is only sentiment that rubs you up the wrong way.

Reverie is the groundwork of creative imagination; it is the privilege of the artist that with him it is not as with other men an escape from reality, but the means by which he accedes to it.