274 Quotes by Rebecca West

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

No one can write a best-seller by taking thought. The slightest touch of insincerity blurs its appeal. The writer who keeps his tongue in his cheek, who knows that he is writing for fools and that, therefore, he had better write like a fool, makes a respectable living out of serials and novelettes; but he will never make the vast, the blaring, half a million success. That comes of blended sincerity and vitality.

I wonder if we are all wrong about each other, if we are just composing unwritten novels about the people we meet?

Babbitt as a book was planless; its end arrived apparently because its author had come to the end of the writing-pad, or rather, one might suspect from its length, to the end of all writing-pads then on the market.

Humanity is never more sphinxlike than when it is expressing itself.

The main difference between men and women is that men are lunatics and women are idiots.

A bad short story or novel or poem leaves one comparatively calm because it does not exist, unless it gets a fake prestige throughbeing mistaken for good work. It is essentially negative, it is something that has not come through. But over bad criticism one has a sense of real calamity.

We all drew on the comfort which is given out by the major works of Mozart, which is as real and material as the warmth given up by a glass of brandy.

A great many quite good plays could be performed with rhythmic howls in the place of dialogue and lose almost nothing by the change.