Americans will listen, but they do not care to read. War and Peace must wait for the leisure of retirement, which never really comes: meanwhile it helps to furnish the living room.

I think art is sublimated libido. You can’t be a eunuch priest, and you can’t be a eunuch artist.

As a chamber hung round about with looking-glasses represents the face upon every turn, thus all the world doth the mercy and the bounty of God; though that be visible, yet it discovers an invisible God and his invisible properties.

He said it was artificial respiration, but now I find I am to have his child.

The downtrodden are the great creators of slang.

One goes on writing partly because it is the only available way of earning a living. It is a hard way and highly competitive. My heart drops into my bowels when I enter a bookshop and see how fierce the competition is...There is also a privier reason for pushing on, and that is the hopeless hope that someday that intractable enemy language will yield to the struggle to control it... Mastery never comes, and one serves a lifelong apprenticeship. The writer cannot retire from the battle; he dies fighting.

To devastate is easier and more spectacular than to create.