Ye want to tell the plain truth all your life, woman, and speak straight; otherwise ye get to seeing double.

I don't know what imagination is, if not an unpruned, tangled kind of memory.

Ye want to tell the plain truth all your life, woman, and speak straight; otherwise ye get to seeing double.

Humorists are always pessimists. They're reactionaries: because they see that every golden cloud has a black lining.

I know your breed; all your fine officials debauch the younger girls who are afraid to lose their jobs: that's as old as Washington.

The sensuality, delicacy of literature does not exist for me; only the passion, energy and struggle… Most of my friends deplore this: they are always telling me what I should leave out in order to have success. But I know that nothing has more success in the end than an intelligent ferocity.

All middle-class novels are about the trials of three, all upper-class novels about mass fornication, all revolutionary novels about a bad man turned good by a tractor.