Habits Are Happiness Of A Sort...

If We Meet An Honest And Intelligent Politician, A Dozen, A Hundred, We Say They Aren't Like Politicians At All, And Our Category Of Politicians Stays Unchanged; We Know What Politicians Are Like.

Human Life Without Some Form Of Poetry Is Not Human Life But Animal Existence.

Underneath All His Writing There Is The Settled Determination To Use Certain Words, To Take Certain Attitudes, To Produce A Certain Atmosphere; What He Is Seeing Or Thinking Or Feeling Has Hardly Any Influence On The Way He Writes. The Reader Can Reply, Ironically, "that's What It Means To Have A Style"; But Few People Have So Much Of One, Or One So Obdurate That You Can Say Of It, "it Is A Style That No Subject Can Change.

Goethe Said, "the Author Whom A Lexicon Can Keep Up With Is Worth Nothing"; Somerset Maugham Says That The Finest Compliment He Ever Received Was A Letter In Which One Of His Readers Said: "i Read Your Novel Without Having To Look Up A Single Word In The Dictionary." These Writers, Plainly, Lived In Different Worlds.

How Can We Expect Novelists To Be Moral, When Their Trade Forces Them To Treat Every End They Meet As No More Than An Imperfect Means To A Novel?