What is pornography to one man is the laughter of genius to another.
One doesn’t know, till one is a bit at odds with the world, how much one’s friends who believe in one rather generously, mean to one.
When we really want to go for something better, we shall smash the old. Until then, any sort of proposal, or making proposals, is no more than a tiresome game for self-important people.
Now go away then, and leave me alone. I don’t want any more of your meretricious persiflage.
Water is H2O, hydrogen two parts, oxygen one, but there is also a third thing, that makes it water and nobody knows what that is.
They lived freely among the students, they argued with the men over philosophical, sociological and artistic matters, they were just as good as the men themselves: only better, since they were women.
There is a sixth sense, the natural religious sense, the sense of wonder.
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.