A great social success is a pretty girl who plays her cards as carefully as if she were plain.
Either you think, or else others have to think for you and take power from you, pervert and discipline your natural tastes, civilize and sterilize you.
I’m a romantic; a sentimental person thinks things will last, a romantic person hopes against hope that they won’t.
In a real dark night of the soul, it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day.
Life is essentially a cheat and its conditions are those of defeat; the redeeming things are not happiness and pleasure but the deeper satisfactions that come out of struggle.
All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.
I like people and I like them to like me, but I wear my heart where God put it, on the inside.
To write it, it took three months; to conceive it three minutes; to collect the data in it all my life.
Some men have a necessity to be mean, as if they were exercising a faculty which they had to partially neglect since early childhood.
I wish I could write. I get these ideas but I never seem to be able to put them in words.
To a profound pessimist about life, being in danger is not depressing.
The world, as a rule, does not live on beaches and in country clubs.
Nothing is as obnoxious as other people’s luck.
Personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures.
Tired, tired with nothing, tired with everything, tired with the world’s weight he had never chosen to bear.
Life plays the same lovely and agonizing joke on all of us.
She was overstrained with grief and loneliness: almost any shoulder would have done as well.
Her philosophy is carpe diem for herself and laissez faire for others.
At fifteen you had the radiance of early morning, at twenty you will begin to have the melancholy brilliance of the moon.
Reserving judgements is a matter of infinite hope.