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…the art of writing has for backbone some fierce attachment to an idea…. It is on the back of an idea, something believed in with conviction or seen w...more

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The nights now are full of wind and destruction; the trees plunge and bend and their leaves fly helter skelter until the lawn is plastered with them a...more

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A learned man is a sedentary, concentrated solitary enthusiast, who searches through books to discover some particular grain of truth upon which he ha...more

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As summer neared, as the evening lengthened there came to the wakeful, the hopeful, walking the beach, stirring the pool, imaginations of the stranges...more

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No sooner have you feasted on beauty with your eyes than your mind tells you that beauty is vain and beauty passes

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The habit of writing for my eye is good practice. It loosens the ligaments.

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Yet who reads to bring about an end, however desirable? Are there not some pursuits that we practise because they are good in themselves, and some ple...more

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Even the names of the books gave me food for thought.

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Second hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticate...more

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That is why Napoleon and Mussolini both insist so emphatically upon the inferiority of women, for if they were not inferior, they would cease to enlar...more

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Shakespeare is getting flyblown; a paternal government might well forbid writing about him, as they put his monument at Stratford beyond the reach of ...more

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Flinging himself from his horse, he made, in his rage, as if he would breast the flood. Standing knee-deep in water he hurled at the faithless woman a...more

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Does it explain my astonishment the other day when Z, most humane, most modest of men, taking up some book by Rebecca West and reading a passage in it...more

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Then may I tell you that the very next words I read were these – ‘Chloe liked Olivia…’ Do not start. Do not blush. Let us admit in the privacy of our ...more

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I find myself saying briefly and prosaically that it is much more important to be oneself than anything else. Do not dream of influencing other people...more