Arnold Bennett Quotes

Ninety percent of the friction of daily life is caused by tone of voice.

A man of sixty has spent twenty years in bed and over three years in eating.

Essential characteristic of the really great novelist: a Christ-like, all-embracing compassion.

If you imagine that you will be able to achieve your ideal by ingeniously planning out a timetable with a pen on a piece of paper, you had better give up hope at once.If you are not prepared for discouragements and disillusions;if you will not be content with a small result for a big effort, then do not begin. Lie down again and resume the uneasy doze which you call your existence.

Pessimism, when you get used to it, is just as agreeable as optimism.

If egotism means a terrific interest in one’s self, egotism is absolutely essential to efficient living.

Literature exists so that where one man has lived finely ten thousand may afterward live finely

The second suggestion is to think as well as to read. I know people who read and read, and for all the good it does them they might just as well cut bread-and-butter. They take to reading as better men take to drink. They fly through the shires of literature on a motor-car, their sole object being motion. They will tell you how many books they have read in a year. Unless you give at least 45 minutes to careful, fatiguing reflection (it is an awful bore at first) upon what you are reading, your 90 minutes of a night are chiefly wasted.

I ought to reflect again and again, and yet again, that the beings that I have to steer are just as inevitable in the scheme of evolution as I am myself; have just as much right to be themselves as I am entitled to; and they all deserve from me as much sympathy as I give to myself.

To write is to make oneself the echo of what cannot cease speaking.

In search of ideas I spent yesterday morning in walking about, and went to the stores and bought things in four departments. A wonderful and delightful way of spending time. I think this sort of activity does stimulate creative ideas.

If you’ve ever really been poor you remain poor at heart all your life. I’ve often walked when I could very well afford to take a taxi because I simply couldn’t bring myself to waste the shilling it would cost.