Seventeen
No author ever lived who could write a page without giving himself away.
Eighteen
To be one’s natural self is the most difficult thing in literature. To be one’s natural self in a drawing-room full of observant eyes is scarcely the gift of the simple debutant, but rather of the experienced diner-out. So in literature: it is not the expert but the unpractised beginner who is guilty of artificiality.
Nineteen
Much nonsense has been talked about the short story. It has been asserted that Englishmen cannot write artistic short stories, that the short story does not come naturally to the Anglo-Saxon. Whereas the truth is that nearly all the finest short-story writers in the world to-day are Englishmen, and some of the most wonderful short stories ever written have been written by Englishmen within the last twenty years.
Twenty
If a book really moves you to anger, the chances are that it is a good book.
Twenty-one
In the cultivation of the mind one of the most important factors is precisely the feeling of strain, of difficulty, of a task which one part of you is anxious to achieve and another part of you is anxious to shirk.