A little morphine in all the air. It would be wonderfully refreshing for everyone.
I am in love – and, my God, it is the greatest thing that can happen to a man. I tell you, find a woman you can fall in love with. Do it. Let yourself fall in love. If you have not done so already, you are wasting your life.
When I read Shakespeare I am struck with wonder that such trivial people should muse and thunder in such lovely language.
I cannot cure myself of that most woeful of youth’s follies – thinking that those who care about us will care for the things that mean much to us.
Sing then the core of dark and absolute oblivion where the soul at last is lost in utter peace.
The past. The Golden Age of the past. What a nostalgia we all feel for it. Yet we don’t want it when we get it. Try the South Seas.
Do come back and draw the ferrets, they are the most lovely noble darlings in the world.
Since obscenity is the truth of our passion today, it is the only stuff of art – or almost the only stuff.
For us to go to Italy and to penetrate into Italy is like a most fascinating act of self-discovery.
I wonder which was more frightened among old tribes – those bursting out of their darkness of woods upon all the space of light, or those from the open tiptoeing into the forests.
Literature is a toil and a snare, a curse that bites deep.
It is our business to go as we are impelled.
Happiness was a term of hypocrisy used to bluff other people.
Patience! Patience! The world is a vast and ghastly intricacy of mechanism, and one has to be very wary, not to get mangled by it.
Sacred love is selfless, seeking not its own. The lover serves his beloved and seeks perfect communion of oneness with her.
Sex and a cocktail: they both lasted about as long, had the same effect, and amounted to about the same thing.
If you don’t like it, alter it, and if you can’t alter it, put up with it.
Try to find your deepest issue in every confusion, and abide by that.
The novel is the highest form of human expression so far attained. Why? Because it is so incapable of the absolute.
Only youth has a taste of immortality.