It is no use trying to sum people up. One must follow hints, not exactly what is said, nor yet entirely what is done.

Age and Aging

At 46 one must be a miser; only have time for essentials.

Apathy

Things have dropped from me. I have outlived certain desires; I have lost friends, some by death... others through sheer inability to cross the street.

Awareness

The man who is aware of himself is henceforward independent; and he is never bored, and life is only too short, and he is steeped through and through with a profound yet temperate happiness.

Childhood

That great Cathedral space which was childhood.

Confidence

Life for both sexes is arduous, difficult, a perpetual struggle. More than anything... it calls for confidence in oneself...And how can we generate this imponderable quality most quickly? By thinking that other people are inferior to oneself.

Critics and Criticism

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.

Dress

There is much to support the view that it is clothes that wear us, and not we, them; we may make them take the mould of arm or breast, but they mould our hearts, our brains, our tongues to their liking.

Human Nature

Really I don't like human nature unless all candied over with art.

Intimacy

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?

Life and Living

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.

Mind

Where the Mind is biggest, the Heart, the Senses, Magnanimity, Charity, Tolerance, Kindliness, and the rest of them scarcely have room to breathe.

Self-control

To enjoy freedom we have to control ourselves.

Women

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

Writers and Writing

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