I avoided writers very carefully because they can perpetuate trouble as no one else can.
So he tasted the deep pain that is reserved only for the strong, just as he had tasted for a little while the deep happiness.
Murder your darlings.
He wanted to appear suddenly to her in novel and heroic colors. He wanted to stir her from that casualness she showed toward everything except herself.
Character is plot, plot is character.
Then I grew up, and the beauty of succulent illusions fell away from me.
I was thirty. Before me stretched the portentous, menacing road of a new decade.
Then it had not been merely the stars to which he had aspired on that June night. He came alive to me, delivered suddenly from the womb of his purposeless splendour.
People invariably chose inimitable people to imitate.
When the lightning strikes one of us, it strikes both.
She was incurably dishonest.
Lie to me by the moonlight. Do a fabulous story.
This is the beauty I want. Beauty has got to be astonishing, astounding – it’s got to burst in on you like a dream, like the exquisite eyes of a girl.
I suppose books mean more than people to me anyway.
It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life.
There’s no beauty without poignancy and there’s no poignancy without the feeling that it’s going, men, names, books, houses – bound for dust – mortal –.
Very well then, better a sane crook than a mad puritan.
She looked at me and laughed pointlessly. Then she flounced over to the dog, kissed it with ecstasy, and swept into the kitchen, implying that a dozen chefs awaited her orders there.
I may turn out an intellectual, but I’ll never write anything but mediocre poetry.
A squalid phantasmagoria of breath.