 The worst vice of the solitary is the worship of his food. |
| Our memories are card indexes consulted and then returned in disorder by authorities whom we do not control. |
| It is a mistake to expect good work from expatriates for it is not what they do that matters but what they are not doing. |
| All charming people have something to conceal, usually their total dependence on the appreciation of others. |
| The only way for writers to meet is to share a quick peek over a common lamp-post. |
| The secret of success is to be in harmony with existence, to be always calm to let each wave of life wash us a little farther up the shore. |
| There is no pain equal to that which two lovers can inflict on one another. This should be made clear to all who contemplate such a union. The avoidance of this pain is the beginning of wisdom, for it is strong enough to contaminate the rest of our lives. |
| No one over thirty-five is worth meeting who has not something to teach us, - something more than we could learn for ourselves, from a book. |
| Classical and romantic: private language of a family quarrel, a dead dispute over the distribution of emphasis between man and nature. |
| A great writer creates a world of his own and his readers are proud to live in it. A lesser writer may entice them in for a moment, but soon he will watch them filing out. |
| Purity engenders Wisdom, Passion avarice, and Ignorance folly, infatuation and darkness. |
| The more books we read, the clearer it becomes that the true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and that no other task is of any consequence. |
| The artist is a member of the leisured classes who cannot pay for his leisure. |
| As repressed sadists are supposed to become policemen or butchers so those with an irrational fear of life become publishers. |
| Whom the gods wish to destroy they first call promising. |
| Slums may well be breeding grounds of crime, but middle class suburbs are incubators of apathy and delirium. |
| The true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and no other task is of any consequence. |
| Words today are like the shells and rope of seaweed which a child brings home glistening from the beach and which in an hour have lost their luster. |
| Like water, we are truest to our nature in repose. |
| No taste is so acquired as that for someone else's quality of mind. |
