All things come to him who mates.
Prose talent depends on having something to say and an interesting, highly developed way of saying it.
I began to realize that for two years my life had been a drawing on resources that I did not possess, that I had been mortgaging myself physically and spiritually up to the hilt.
So they were desperately in love and being desperately in love involves a desperate existence.
A writer’s temperament is continually making him do things he can never repair.
There’s so much spring in the air- there’s so much lazy sweetness in your heart.
You have to develop a conscience and if on top of that you have talent so much the better. But if you have talent without conscience, you are just one of many thousand journalists.
Happiness is the relief after extreme tension.
The men – the undergraduates of Yale and Princeton are cleaner, healthier, better-looking, better dressed, wealthier and more attractive than any undergraduate body in the country.
I never believe much in happiness. I never believe in misery either. Those are things you see on the stage or the screen or the printed page, they never really happen to you in life.
To most women art is a form of scandal.
The mind of a little child is fascinating, for it looks on old things with new eyes-but at about twelve this changes. The adolescent offers nothing, can do nothing, say nothing that the adult cannot do better.
Now the standard cure for one who is sunk is to consider those in actual destitution or physical suffering.
Poetry is either something that lives like fire inside you.
Eighteen might look at thirty-four through a rising mist of adolescence, but twenty-two would see thirty-eight with discerning clarity.
The sign of intelligence is the ability to carry opposed thoughts at the same time.
Premature success gives one an almost mystical conception of destiny as opposed to will power-at its worst the Napoleonic delusion.
The world is always curious, and people become valuable merely for their inaccessibility.
This is what I think now: that the natural state of the sentient adult is a qualified unhappiness.
Your first most typical figure in any new place turns out to be a bluff or a local nuisance.