When the desire is on for one particular person, nobody else will do.

A lot of warm vulgarity is incomparably preferable to a little bit of pinched niceness

[On journalists:] They are as disruptive a menace to the public body: as grating turds in the intestines are to the private body.

Sex divorced from love is the thief of personal dignity.

Anyone who has attempted to create knows the hellishness of it, which consists in the final inescapability from it. Knows that anything, however deadly humdrum to drug the senses, is preferable to it. Knows the gigantic effort to get started on the boundless, unwieldy, shapeless material; the forest of hesitations; of what to keep and what to throw out; the running-out terror and reluctance in one of finishing.

In America they make too much fuss of poets; in London they make too little.

Love can bear anything better than ridicule.