Prohibitions create the desire they were intended to cure.
Guilt always hurries towards its complement, punishment: only there does its satisfaction lie.
I have been thinking about the girl I met last night in the mirror: dark on the marble-ivory white: glossy black hair: deep suspiring eyes in which one’s glances sink because they are nervous, curious, turned to sexual curiosity.
Whatever the heart desires, it purchases at the cost of soul.
I suppose the secret of his success is in his tremendous idleness which almost approaches the supernatural.
Gamblers and lovers really play to lose.
Art like life is an open secret.
He thought and suffered a good deal but he lacked the resolution to dare – the first requisite of a practitioner.
The artist’s work constitutes the only satisfactory relationship he can have with his fellow men since he seeks his real friends among the dead and the unborn.
They say that if you get bored enough with calamity you can learn to laugh.
A critic is a lug-worm in the liver of literature.
Science is the poetry of the intellect and poetry the science of the heart’s affections.
The heaviest impact of the work of art is in the guts. Art does not reason. It manhandles you and changes you...
Somewhere in the heart of experience there is an order and a coherence which we might purprise if we were attentive enough, loving enough, or patient enough.
People only see in us the contemptible skirt-fever which rules our actions but completely miss the beauty-hunger underlying it.
Everything really desirable has come about because of, or in spite of, wine!
Old age is an insult. It’s like being smacked.
An idea is like a rare bird which cannot be seen. What one sees is the trembling of the branch it has just left.
To be the equal of reality you must learn how to ignore it without danger.
You see, nothing matters except pleasure – which is the opposite of happiness, its tragic part, I expect.