 An artist is a creature driven by demons. He doesn't know why they choose him and he's usually too busy to wonder why. |
| The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life. |
| If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate: The "Ode on a Grecian Urn" is worth any number of old ladies. |
| I decline to accept the end of man. |
| A writer must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid. |
| Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders. |
| Our tragedy is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it... the basest of all things is to be afraid. |
| The end of wisdom is to dream high enough to lose the dream in the seeking of it. |
| I'm bad and I'm going to hell, and I don't care. I'd rather be in hell than anywhere where you are. |
| Unless you're ashamed of yourself now and then, you're not honest. |
| Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself. |
| A man's moral conscience is the curse he had to accept from the gods in order to gain from them the right to dream. |
| If I had not existed, someone else would have written me, Hemingway, Dostoevski, all of us. |
| Maybe the only thing worse than having to give gratitude constantly is having to accept it. |
| It is my aim, and every effort bent, that the sum and history of my life, which in the same sentence is my obit and epitaph too, shall be them both: He made the books and he died. |
| Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do. Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself. |
| This is a free country. Folks have a right to send me letters, and I have a right not to read them. |
| If I were reincarnated, I'd want to come back a buzzard. Nothing hates him or envies him or wants him or needs him. He is never bothered or in danger, and he can eat anything. |
| We have to start teaching ourselves not to be afraid. |
| Perhaps they were right in putting love into books... Perhaps it could not live anywhere else. |
