Rebecca West

Motherhood is the strangest thing, it can be like being one's own Trojan horse.

Any authentic work of art must start an argument between the artist and his audience.

There is no logical reason why the camel of great art should pass through the needle of mob intelligence.

Journalism: an ability to meet the challenge of filling the space.

Writing has nothing to do with communication between person and person, only with communication between different parts of a person's mind.

People call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or a prostitute.

It is the soul's duty to be loyal to its own desires.

Just how difficult it is to write biography can be reckoned by anybody who sits down and considers just how many people know the real truth about his or her love affairs.

I take it as a prime cause of the present confusion of society that it is too sickly and too doubtful to use pleasure as a test of value.

Nobody likes having salt rubbed into their wounds even if it is the salt of the earth.

There is a definite process by which one made people into friends and it involved talking to them and listening to them for hours at a time.

Nothing succeeds like failure.

There is no such thing as conversation. It is an illusion. There are intersecting monologues. That is all.

Their faces were clay-coloured and featureless, yet not stupid; they might have been shrewd turnips.

For the sake of my country, and perhaps a little for the sake of my soul, I have given up the deep peace of being in opposition.

Now I recall my emotions at that moment, children seem to me a remarkable race. They want so much to murder so many people, and they so rarely murder anybody at all.

The world is round and the place which may seem like the end may also be only the beginning.

[N]obody likes having salt rubbed into their wounds, even if it is the salt of the earth.