novelist & playwright (1863-1930)
Art is long, and the talk about it is even longer.
WILLIAM JOHN LOCKE
attributed, 20,000 Quips & Quotes
To read of human depravity in the police reports is one thing, to see it fall like a black shadow across one's life is another.
WILLIAM JOHN LOCKE
Septimus
I think love is serious. It's like an invention: sometimes it lies deep down inside you, great and quiet--and at other times it racks you and keeps you from sleeping.
WILLIAM JOHN LOCKE
Septimus
As I enter on the path of happiness, I scatter the dregs and shreds and clippings of the past behind me. I divest myself of all the crapulous years.
WILLIAM JOHN LOCKE
The Beloved Vagabond
"I love Nunsmere," said the Literary Man from London. "It is a spot where faded lives are laid away in lavender."
WILLIAM JOHN LOCKE
Septimus
The only remedy against the malady of life is life itself. The bane is its own antidote.
WILLIAM JOHN LOCKE
The Glory of Clementina
Sex is the ... tremulous and bewildering and nerve-racking and delicious and myriad-adjectived soul-condition ... generally known as love. Ninety-nine point nine repeater percent of the world's literature has been devoted to its analysis. It's therefore of some importance.
WILLIAM JOHN LOCKE
The Mountebank
Life is too transcendentally humorous for a man not to take it seriously. Compared with it, Death is but a shallow jest.
WILLIAM JOHN LOCKE
Simon the Jester
No matter through what realms of the fantastic you may travel, you arrive inevitably at the commonplace.
WILLIAM JOHN LOCKE
The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne
The only cure for loss of illusions is fresh illusions, more illusions, and always illusions.
WILLIAM JOHN LOCKE
The Glory of Clementina
In France the men all live in cafes, the children are all put out to nurse, and the women, saving the respect of mademoiselle -- well, the less said about them the better.
WILLIAM JOHN LOCKE
The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol
Women are women and can't help themselves.
WILLIAM JOHN LOCKE
The Red Planet
If you love a Dream Woman ... let her stay the divine Woman of the Dream. To awaken and clasp flesh and blood, no matter how delicately tender, and find that love has sped at the dawn is a misery too deep for tears.
WILLIAM JOHN LOCKE
The Beloved Vagabond
Every man's first declaration of love is bathos--the zenith of his passion connoting perhaps the nadir of his intelligence.
WILLIAM JOHN LOCKE
Jaffery
Men are men and women are women. We've tried for tens of thousands of years to lay down hard and fast lines for the sexes to walk upon, and we've failed miserably.
WILLIAM JOHN LOCKE
The Red Planet
Any human love a man gets he can make fill his life. It's like the grain of mustard-seed.
WILLIAM JOHN LOCKE
Where Love Is
Children are the root of all evil.... Happy the man who has his quiver empty.
WILLIAM JOHN LOCKE
The Christmas Mystery
Our happiness is made up of the things we miss.
WILLIAM JOHN LOCKE
Where Love Is
I felt I had stepped into something big and splendid, as if I had been a caterpillar walking into the heart of a red rose. I felt prim and small and petty. Until then I had never known what love meant.
WILLIAM JOHN LOCKE
Simon the Jester
You have never seen ugliness in a happy face.
WILLIAM JOHN LOCKE
The Beloved Vagabond