Desmond MacCarthy

"As every reader of novels knows, if once the novelist has made his heroine speak rightly he can spare a description of her beauty; if he can transmit the emotion of the moment he need only say the sun was up, for his figures to stand in the glances of the morning and the birds to begin to sing in the woods: it is the same with acting and stage properties. may drink to the health of her assembling guests from a gilded marmalade pot, if only she raises it properly to her lips, with as much effect as if she drank from a cup copied from a museum treasure."

"Judged by the influence upon men's minds alone, the writings which Leslie Stephen collected in Essays on Free-thinking and Plain-speaking (1873), and in An Agnostic's Apology (1893) (most of the latter written much earlier), must be considered the most important part of his life's work. One reason why, as we shall be presently reminded, he wrote disparagingly of literary criticism, was that it seemed so trivial compared with criticism of thought and religion. What if he had induced some readers to take a clearer view of the merits and limitations of Fielding or De Quincey, or if he had succeeded in giving a tolerably true account of some man's life? Of what importance was that compared with helping men to a truer conception of the nature of things, or with the work of a man of science?"

"has never been a spiritual home to me; but let me add that I have not got one, although at Cambridge for a few years I fancied that I had. 'Bloomsbury' had been to me, rather, what those who cater for sailors (like their, my home is a floating one) call 'a home from home'. Looking back I see that I converged upon 'Bloomsbury' by three ways: through making friends with , through getting to know some junior to me, and through my introduction into the home-life of and ."

"Many changes within human beings, such as offer the most interesting themes, are inevitably hidden and silent, or too gradual for drama. 'To penetrate deeply into the human consciousness is the glory of the philosopher, the moralist, the , and, to a certain degree, even of the lyric poet', but the capacity to do so is not enough to make a dramatist."

"... the has to tell his story entirely in the present tense. We must allow him a certain license in foreshortening changes in human beings which in order to be true to life require the passage of time."