Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self.

Destroy him as you will, the bourgeois always bounces up — execute him, expropriate him, starve him out en masse, and he reappears in your children.

He reduced everything to politics; he was also unalterably of the Left. His line may have been unpopular or unfashionable, but he followed it unhesitatingly; in fact it was an obsession. He could not blow his nose without moralising on conditions in the handkerchief industry.

I greet you, my educated fellow bourgeois, whose interests and whose doubts I share.

I shall christen this style the Mandarin (bureaucrat)|Mandarin, since it is beloved by literary pundits, by those who would make the written word as unlike as possible to the spoken one. It is the style of all those writers whose tendency is to make their language convey more than they mean or more than they feel, it is the style of most artists and all humbugs.

Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice; journalism what will be grasped at once, and they require separate techniques.

The lesson one can learn from Firbank is that of inconsequence. There is the vein which he tapped and which has not yet been fully exploited.

So wrote Walter Pater|Pater, calling an art-for-art's sake muezzin to the faithful from the topmost turret of the ivory tower.