The only real people are the people who never existed, and if a novelist is base enough to go to life for his personages he should at least pretend that they are creations, and not boast of them as copies. The justification of a character in a novel is not that other persons are what they are, but that the author is what he is. Otherwise the novel is not a work of art.

He who lives more lives than one More deaths than one must die.

You can dine with me to-night, Dorian, can't you?" He shook his head. "To-night she is Imogen," he answered, "and to-morrow night she will be Juliet." "When is she Sibyl Vane?" "Never." "I congratulate you.

Every Saint has a past. Every Sinner, has a future.

The one charm of the past is that it is the past. But women never know when the curtain has fallen. They always want a sixth act, and as soon as the interest of the play is entirely over, they propose to continue it. If they were allowed their own way, every comedy would have a tragic ending, and every tragedy would culminate in a farce. They are charmingly artificial, but they have no sense of art.

I begin with an idea and then it becomes something else.

Every act of creation is first of all an act of destruction. ? Pablo Picasso

I begin with an idea, and then it becomes something else."-Pablo Picasso- read 6/3/17

You can't change your past, but you can change your mind about your past.

Come to think it over, I don't entirely agree with it myself. Not everything I wrote yesterday appeals to me today. I am glad to learn what you think on the subject. The next time you are in the neighborhood you must visit us and we'll get this subject threshed out for all time. So here is a handclasp over the miles, and I am, Yours sincerely

There is only one way on God's green footstool that the past can be constructive; and that is by calmly analysing our past mistakes and profiting by them-and forgetting them.

I'll let John Baillie answer that. He was a distinguished professor who taught theology at the University of Edinburgh. He said: "What makes a man a Christian is neither his intellectual acceptance of certain ideas, nor his conformity to a certain rule, but his possession of a certain Spirit, and his participation in a certain Life.