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.
Frost in January minus 20 for a week. Dead birds frozen on the branch – they fall with the first thaw like ripe fruit – death-ripened. We shall all end like them – just a stain in the snow.
You see, nothing matters except pleasure – which is the opposite of happiness, its tragic part, I expect.
Sorrow is implicit in love as gravitation is implicit in mass.
Everyone loathes his own country and countrymen if he is any sort of artist.
Love is like trench warfare – you cannot see the enemy, but you know he is there and that it is wiser to keep your head down.
I am just a refugee from the long slow toothache of English life. It is terrible to love life so much you can hardly breathe!