The final lesson a writer learns is that everything can nourish the writer.

I don't tell the truth any more to those who can't make use of it. I tell it mostly to myself, because it always changes me.

He had a mania for washing and disinfecting himself. . . . For him the only danger came from the microbes that attacked the body. He had not studied the microbe of conscience which eats into the soul.

Living never wore one out so much as the effort not to live.

At first I protested and rebelled against poetry. I was about to deny my poetic worlds. I was doing violence to my illusions with analysis, science, and learning Henry’s language, entering Henry’s world. I wanted to destroy by violence and animalism my tenuous fantasies and illusions and my hypersensitivity. A kind of suicide. The ignominy awakened me. Then June came and answered the cravings of my imagination and saved me. Or perhaps she killed me, for now I am started on a course of madness.

We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are.

Ordinary life does not interest me. I seek only the high moments. I am in accord with the surrealists, searching for the marvelous.