You've got to be hurt and upset; otherwise you can't think of the really good, penetrating, X-rayish phrases.

Real orgies are never so exciting as pornographic books. In a volume by Pierre Louys all the girls are young and their figures perfect; there's no hiccoughing or bad breath, no fatigue or boredom, no sudden recollections of unpaid bills or business letters unanswered, to interrupt the raptures. Art gives you the sensation, the thought, the feeling quite pure--chemically pure, I mean,... not morally.

Such prosperity as we have known it up to the present is the consequence of rapidly spending the planet's irreplaceable capital.

Books have their destinies like men. And their fates, as made by generations of readers, are very different from the destinies foreseen for them by their authors. Gulliver's Travels, with a minimum of expurgation, has become a children's book; a new illustrated edition is produced every Christmas. That's what comes of saying profound things about humanity in terms of a fairy story.

Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth. By simply not mentioning certain subjects... totalitarian propagandists have influenced opinion much more effectively than they could have by the most eloquent denunciations.

The critics don't interest me because they're concerned with what's past and done, while I'm concerned with what comes next.

Indifference to all the refinements of life--it's really shocking. Just Calvinism, that's all. Calvinism without the excuse of Calvin's theology.