"Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man, at twice its natural size"

"The word-coining genius, as if thought plunged into a sea of words and came up dripping."

"Young women... you are, in my opinion, disgracefully ignorant. You have never made a discovery of any sort of importance. You have never shaken an empire or led an army into battle. The plays by Shakespeare are not by you, and you have never introduced a barbarous race to the blessings of civilization. What is your excuse?"

"The interest in life does not lie in what people do, nor even in their relations to each other, but largely in the power to communicate with a third party, antagonistic, enigmatic, yet perhaps persuadable, which one may call life in general."

"It will be all over this day week - comfort - discomfort; and the zest and rush that no engagements, hours, habits give. Then we shall take them up again with more than the zest of traveling."

"Without self-confidence we are as babes in the cradles. And how can we generate this imponderable quality, which is yet so invaluable most quickly? By thinking that other people are inferior to oneself."

"Novels so often provide an anodyne and not an antidote, glide one into torpid slumbers instead of rousing one with a burning brand."

"Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible."

"A woman must have money and room of her own if she is to write fiction"

"What is meant by ''reality''? It would seem to be something very erratic, very undependable -- now to be found in a dusty road, now in a scrap of newspaper in the street, now a daffodil in the sun. It lights up a group in a room and stamps some casual saying"

"Language is wine upon the lips"

"Methinks the human method of expression by sound of tongue is very elementary, and ought to be substituted for some ingenious invention which should be able to give vent to at least six coherent sentences at once."

"We all indulge in the strange, pleasant process called thinking, but when it comes to saying, even to someone opposite, what we think, then how little we are able to convey! The phantom is through the mind and out of the window before we can lay salt on"

"I read the book of Job last night, I don't think God comes out well in it."

"If one could be friendly with women, what a pleasure - the relationship so secret and private compared with relations with men. Why not write about it truthfully?"

"It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple: one must be a woman manly, or a man womanly."

"Somewhere, everywhere, now hidden, now apparent in what ever is written down, is the form of a human being. If we seek to know him, are we idly occupied?"

"This is not writing at all. Indeed, I could say that Shakespeare surpasses literature altogether, if I knew what I meant."

"Who shall measure the heat and violence of the poet's heart when caught and tangled in a woman's body?"

"Why are women... so much more interesting to men than men are to women?"

"Yet it is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top."

"It is the nature of the artist to mind excessively what is said about him. Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others."

"Yet, it is true, poetry is delicious; the best prose is that which is most full of poetry."

"Thought and theory must precede all salutary action; yet action is nobler in itself than either thought or theory."

"My own brain is to me the most unaccountable of machinery - always buzzing, humming, soaring roaring diving, and then buried in mud. And why? What's this passion for?"

"Indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman."

"There can be no two opinions as to what a highbrow is. He is the man or woman of thoroughbred intelligence who rides his mind at a gallop across country in pursuit of an idea."

"A woman must have money and a room of her own."

"Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so slightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible."

"The beauty of the world, which is so soon to perish, has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder."

"Almost any biographer, if he respects facts, can give us much more than another fact to add to our collection. He can give us the creative fact; the fertile fact; the fact that suggests and engenders."

"Boredom is the legitimate kingdom of the philanthropic."

"Humour is the first of the gifts to perish in a foreign tongue."

"Nothing induces me to read a novel except when I have to make money by writing about it. I detest them."

"Who shall measure the hat and violence of the poet's heart when caught and tangled in a woman's body?"

"The history of men's opposition to women's emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself."

"Once conform, once do what other people do because they do it, and a lethargy steals over all the finer nerves and faculties of the soul. She becomes all outer show and inward emptiness; dull, callous, and indifferent."

"As a woman I have no country. As a woman my country is the whole world."

"Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by heart and his friends can only read the title."

"One likes people much better when they're battered down by a prodigious siege of misfortune than when they triumph."

"We are nauseated by the sight of trivial personalities decomposing in the eternity of print."

"Let a man get up and say, Behold, this is the truth, and instantly I perceive a sandy cat filching a piece of fish in the background. Look, you have forgotten the cat, I say."

"Humor is the first of the gifts to perish in a foreign tongue."

"Great bodies of people are never responsible for what they do."

"These are the soul's changes. I don't believe in ageing. I believe in forever altering one's aspect to the sun. Hence my optimism."

"A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction."

"Mental fight means thinking against the current, not with it. It is our business to puncture gas bags and discover the seeds of truth."

"Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others."

"Masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice."

"A masterpiece is something said once and for all, stated, finished, so that it's there complete in the mind, if only at the back."