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.
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.