"Let us invent a character, a nice respectable, middle-class, middle-aged, maiden lady, with time on her hands and the money to help her pass it. She enjoys pictures, books, music, and the theatre and though to none of these arts (or rather, for consistency's sake, to none of these three arts and the one craft) does she bring much knowledge or discernment, at least, as she is apt to tell her cronies, she "does know what she likes". Let us call her Aunt Edna."

"A novelist may lose his readers for a few pages; a playwright never dares lose his audience for a minute."

"Not to be sneezed at."

"Oh, London is a fine town, A very famous city, Where all the streets are paved with gold, And all the maidens pretty."

"On their own merits modest men are dumb."

"Like two single gentlemen rolled into one."

"Lord help you! Tell ’em Queen Anne's dead."

"Praise the bridge that carried you over."

"But when ill indeed, E'en dismissing the doctor don't always succeed."

"My father was an eminent button maker — but I had a soul above buttons — I panted for a liberal profession."

"Sudden resolutions, like the sudden rise of the mercury in the barometer, indicate little else than the changeableness of the weather."

"The virtue of Paganism was strength: the virtue of Christianity is obedience."

"Some people carry their hearts in their heads; very many carry their heads in their hearts. The difficulty is to keep them apart, and yet both actively working together."

"The ultimate tendency of civilization is toward barbarism."

"Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of Nature."

"Purity is the feminine, Truth the masculine, of Honour."

"Thought is the wind, knowledge the sail."

"Smiles are the language of love."

"In oratory the will must predominate."

"None but a fool is always right."

"Nothing is further than Earth from Heaven: nothing is nearer than Heaven to Earth."

"Children always turn toward the light."

"To those whose god is honour, disgrace alone is sin."

"Our poetry in the eighteenth century was prose; our prose in the seventeenth, poetry."

"And, on the label of the stuff, He wrote this verse; Which one would think was clear enough, And terse:— When taken, To be well shaken."

"The act of writing is the act of discovering what you believe."

"A weak mind sinks under prosperity, as well as under adversity. A strong and deep mind has two highest tides – when the moon is at the full, and when there is no moon."

"Yes books are valuable. But not reading of books will take the place of a daily, candid, honest examination of what one has recently done, and what one is about to do - of a steady looking at one's self in the face (disconcerting though the sight may be)."

"A prig is a pompous fool who has gone out for a ceremonial walk, and without knowing it has lost an important part of his attire, namely, his sense of humour."

"And, having once decided to achieve a certain task, achieve it at all costs of tedium and distaste. The gain in self-confidence of having accomplished a tiresome labour is immense."

"Journalists say a thing that they know isn't true, in the hope that if they keep on saying it long enough it will be true."

"The price of justice is eternal publicity."

"A cause may be inconvenient, but it's magnificent. It's like champagne or high heels, and one must be prepared to suffer for it."

"is the story of a marriage. It was written out of experience and disappointment, and out of a kind of triumph. Marriage is appalling, says Bennett, but it is worth it. And he was well qualified to make the statement."

"Being a husband is a whole-time job. That is why so many husbands fail. They can't give their entire attention to it."

"Success is often described as a damaging thing for a writer, not so much because money is the root of all evil, but because it cuts him away from the material which is his strength. Arnold Bennett is probably the very best example of that in literature. When he was writing about the , he wrote magnificently because he wrote of what he knew in his veins, what is in his blood, his sinews. That is what he had known in his childhood and early years. When big success came, and he came up to London and he moved in a vivid and fashionable world, among very much more interesting people, very much more important people than he had known as a boy, he wrote nothing that was convincing; he described s, s, and restaurants in the . His work became... it was like cut flowers; it had no roots in itself, and this particular problem is worrying the novelist all the time because he knows he’s not getting the right material for his books."

"Does there, I wonder, exist a being who has read all, or approximately all, that the person of average culture is supposed to have read, and that not to have read is a social sin? If such a being does exist, surely he is an old, a very old man."

"'Tis a very fine thing to be father-in-law To a very magnificent three-tailed Bashaw!"

"The theatre is the best way of showing the gap between what is said and what is seen to be done, and that is why, ragged and gap-toothed as it is, it has still a far healthier potential than some poorer, abandoned arts."

"[Published shortly after Weldon died in January 2023] Twenty years ago, I was dispatched to interview Weldon at home in Hampstead, north London. Her then husband, Nick, answered the door and immediately began a brutal interrogation. My name sounded familiar. Hadn't I given Fay's novel The Bulgari Connection, a book controversially sponsored by the Italian jeweller, a stinking review? Uh oh. But I wasn’t about to confess: I had a job to do. Was it definitely me he was thinking of? And was the review really a stinker? Maybe marital loyalty had made it seem worse than it was. The interview began. Fay and I were getting along just fine when the door burst open. In strode her husband, in his hand a copy of the dreaded review, extracts from which he proceeded to read aloud as my entire body turned crimson (though I have to admit – icy chip and all that – I was also thinking what a good anecdote this would make later). As for Fay, a woman who understood revenge, she was enjoying herself mightily. "She's very hard, isn’t she?" she said to Nick, smiling like a goblin. "She's very difficult. She probably didn't like it because it didn't have any sex in it." And then: "Look, you've embarrassed the poor girl now." His work done, Nick left the room and we resumed, as if nothing had happened."

"Widows tend either to fade away when husbands die, committing emotional suttee, or else find that a new life burgeons. Here in Christchurch, a lot of burgeoning goes on."

"I like sex. I've had feedback but men will feed you back anything, won't they?"

"One sort of believes in recycling. But one believes in it as a kind of palliative to the gods."

"Young women especially have something invested in being nice people, and it's only when you have children that you realise you’re not a nice person at all, but generally a selfish bully."

"Go to work on an egg."

"Nothing happens, and nothing happens, and then everything happens."

"Johnson's style was grand and Gibbon’s elegant; the stateliness of the former was sometimes pedantic, and the polish of the latter was occasionally finical. Johnson marched to kettle-drums and trumpets. Gibbon moved to flutes and hautboys. Johnson hewed passages through the Alps, while Gibbon levelled walks through parks and gardens."

"His heart runs away with his head."

"And what's impossible can't be, And never, never comes to pass."