The crown of literature is poetry. It is its end and aim. It is the sublimest activity of the human mind. It is the achievement of beauty and delicacy. The writer of prose can only step aside when the poet passes.
When you’re eighteen your emotions are violent, but they’re not durable.
It is not difficult to be unconventional in the eyes of the world when your unconventionality is but the convention of your set.
There is a sort of man who pays no attention to his good actions, but is tormented by his bad ones. This is the type that most often writes about himself.
It might be that to surrender to happiness was to accept defeat, but it was a defeat better than many victories.
The most valuable thing I have learned from life is to regret nothing.
Life wouldn’t be worth living if I worried over the future as well as the present. When things are at their worst I find something always happens.
A writer need not devour a whole sheep in order to know what mutton tastes like, but he must at least eat a chop. Unless he gets his facts right, his imagination will lead him into all kinds of nonsense, and the facts he is most likely to get right are the facts of his own experience.
First, cut out all the wisdom, then cut out all the adjectives.
Well, you know when people are no good at anything else they become writers.
Women are often under the impression that men are much more madly in love with them than they really are.
What do we any of us have but our illusions? And what do we ask of others but that we be allowed to keep them?
I write only when inspiration strikes. Fortunately it strikes every morning at nine o’clock sharp.
The fact that a great many people believe something is no guarantee of its truth.
I don’t think of the past. The only thing that matters is the everlasting present.
Beauty is an ecstasy; it is as simple as hunger. There is really nothing to be said about it. It is like the perfume of a rose: you can smell it and that is all.
Tradition is a guide and not a jailer.
My own belief is that there is hardly anyone whose sexual life, if it were broadcast, would not fill the world at large with surprise and horror.
In Hollywood, the women are all peaches. It makes one long for an apple occasionally.
Its a toss-up when you decide to leave the beaten track. Many are called, few are chosen.