It’s terrible to be young. It’s terrible. Terrible.
You don’t dare think whole even to yourself the entirety of a dear hope or wish let alone a desperate one else you yourself have doomed it.
Who gathers the withered rose?
Idleness breeds our better virtues.
I love Virginians because Virginians are all snobs and I like snobs. A snob has to spend so much time being a snob that he has little time left to meddle with you.
So long as the deceit ran along quiet and monotonous, all of us let ourselves be deceived, abetting it unawares or maybe through cowardice...
We have all heard what we wanted to hear! Truth that sounds right to our ears!
You should approach Joyce’s Ulysses as the illiterate Baptist preacher approaches the Old Testament: with faith.
It was like something you have dreaded and feared and dodged for years until it seemed like all your life, then despite everything it happened to you and all it was was just pain, all it did was hurt and so it was all over, all finished, all right.
Let the past abolish the past when – and if – it can substitute something better.
The good artist believes that nobody is good enough to give him advice. He has supreme vanity. No matter how much he admires the old writer, he wants to beat him.
One day I was talking to Cora. She prayed for me because she believed I was blind to sin, wanting me to kneel and pray too, because people to whom sin is just a matter of words, to them salvation is just words too.
I don’t know anything about inspiration because I don’t know what inspiration is; I’ve heard about it, but I never saw it.
You have to write badly in order to write well.
Most men are a little better than their circumstances give them a chance to be.
They say that it is the practiced liar who can deceive. But so often the practiced and chronic liar deceives only himself; it is the man who all his life has been selfconvicted of veracity whose lies find quickest credence.
I draw no petty social lines. A man to me is a man, wherever I find him.
All men are just accumulations dolls stuffed with sawdust swept up from the trash heaps where all previous dolls had been thrown away.
A man is the sum of his misfortunes.
The whiskey died away in time and was renewed and died again, but the street ran on. From that night the thousand streets ran as one street, with imperceptible corners and changes of scene...