Oh! it is absurd to have a hard-and-fast rule about what one should read and what one shouldn't. More than half of modern culture depends on what one shouldn't read.

The only way to behave to a woman is to make love to her if she is pretty, and to someone else if she is plain.

The difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable, and literature is not read

Romantic literature is in effect imaginative lying.

How you can sit there, calmly eating muffins when we are in this horrible trouble, I can’t make out. You seem to me to be perfectly heartless."

"Well, I can’t eat muffins in an agitated manner. The butter would probably get on my cuffs. One should always eat muffins quite calmly. It is the only way to eat them."

"I say it’s perfectly heartless your eating muffins at all, under the circumstances.

The mimicry of passion is the most intolerable of all poses.