She was dazzling – alight; it was agony to comprehend her beauty in a glance.
I see now that this has been a story of the West, after all – Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I, were all Westerners, and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life.
Very few of the people who accentuate the futility of life remark the futility of themselves. Perhaps they think that in proclaiming the evil of living they somehow salvage their own worth from the ruin – but they don’t, even you and I...
Sometimes it is harder to deprive oneself of a pain than of a pleasure.
I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others – young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life.
She was a mischief, and that was a satisfaction; no longer was she a huntress of corralled game.
Very strong personalities must confine themselves in mutual conversation to very gentle subjects.
It takes a genius to whine appealingly.
The compensation of a very early success is a conviction that life is a romantic matter. In the best sense one stays young.
She was a faded but still lovely woman of twenty-seven.
Poetry is either something that lives like fire inside you – like music to the musician or Marxism to the Communist – or else it is nothing, an empty, formalized bore around which pedants can endlessly drone their notes and explanations.
Isn’t Hollywood a dump-in the human sense of the word. A hideous town, pointed up by the insulting gardens of its rich, full of the human spirit at a new low of debasement.
Debut: the first time a young girl is seen drunk in public.
That however the brains and abilities of men may differ, their stomachs are essentially the same.
If you try to create a type, you may end with nothing. If you do a good job of creating an individual, you may succeed at creating a type.
If you are strong enough, there are no precedents.
Scratch a Yale man with both hands and you’ll be lucky to find a coast-guard. Usually you find nothing at all.
Often I think writing is a sheer paring away of oneself leaving always something thinner, barer, more meagre.
Every one suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues.
No decent career was ever founded on a public.