Youth is a period of missed opportunities.
The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication.
Approaching forty, I had a singular dream in which I almost grasped the meaning and understood the nature of what it is that wastes in wasted time.
In my religion all believers would stop work at sundown and have a drink together.
For what is liberty but the unhampered translation of will into act?
We must select the illusion which appeals to our temperament, and embrace it with passion, if we want to be happy.
Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice; journalism what will be grasped at once.
Our memories are card indexes consulted and then returned in disorder by authorities whom we do not control.
As repressed sadists are supposed to become policemen or butchers so those with an irrational fear of life become publishers.
Always be nice to those younger than you, because they are the ones who will be writing about you.
The greatest problem with women is how to contrive that they should seem our equals.
Industrial society seems likely to be entering a period of severe stress, due in part to problems of human behavior and in part to economic and environmental problems.
A life based on reason will always require to be balanced by an occasional bout of violent and irrational emotion, for instinctual drives must be satisfied.
Most people do not believe in anything very much and our greatest poetry is given to us by those who do.
In my religion, there would be no exclusive doctrine; all would be love, poetry, and doubt.
Everyone has the right to express an opinion. No one has the right to be listened to.
The civilized are those who get more out of life than the uncivilized, and for this we are not likely to be forgiven.
Today the function of the artist is to bring imagination to science and science to imagination, where they meet, in the myth.
When I write after dark the shades of evening scatter their purple through my prose.
From now on – specialize; never again make any concession to the ninety-nine percent of you which is like everyon else at the expense of the one percent which is unique.