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

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.

resignation, perhaps the most stifling word in the language.

there is no gaiety as gay as the gaiety of grief.

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

Between threading a needle and raving insanity is the smallest eye in creation.

I had got to the dawn of the beautiful not caring, but fully aware, stage, which degenerates so imperceptibly into the doing something unpermissible stage.