We pay for vice by the knowledge that we are wicked; we pay for pleasure when we find out too late that we are nothing.
A love affair is a grafting operation. “What has once been joined never forgets”. There is a moment when the graft takes; up to then it is possible without difficulty the separation which afterwards comes only through breaking off a great hunk of oneself; the ingrown fibre of hours, days, years.
Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self.
The true index of a man’s character is the health of his wife.
Fallen leaves lying on the grass in the November sun bring more happiness than the daffodils.
How many books did Renoir write on how to paint?
All charming people have something to conceal, usually their total dependence on the appreciation of others.
While thoughts exist, words are alive and literature becomes an escape, not from, but into living.
Hate is the consequence of fear; we fear something before we hate it; a child who fears noises becomes a man who hates noise.
The one way to get thin is to re-establish a purpose in life.
The shock, for an intelligent writer, of discovering for the first time that there are people younger than himself who think him stupid is severe.
There are many who dare not kill themselves for fear of what the neighbours will say.
No city should be too large for a man to walk out of in a morning.
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.
The books I haven’t written are better than the books other people have.
Everything is a dangerous drug except reality which is unendurable.
Beneath this mask of selfish tranquility nothing exists except bitterness and boredom. I am one of those whom suffering has made empty and frivilous: each night in my dreams I pull the scab off a wound; each day, vacuous and habit ridden, I let it reform.
It is only in the country that we can get to know a person or a book.
If one is too lazy to think, too vain to do a thing badly, too cowardly to admit it, one will never attain wisdom.
Hemingway is great in that alone of living writers he has saturated his work with the memory of physical pleasure, with sunshine and salt water, with food, wine and making love and the remorse which is the shadow of that sun.