Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.

Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.

All government is an ugly necessity.

Beneath the rule of men entirely great, / The pen is mightier than the sword.

Modern tragic writers have to write short stories; if they wrote long stories…cheerfulness would creep in. Such stories are like stings; brief, but purely painful.

People wonder why the novel is the most popular form of literature; people wonder why it is read more than books of science or books of metaphysics. The reason is very simple; it is merely that the novel is more true than they are.