Money is a jealous mistress If you want money you must want only money. ... I must tell you the one secret of life, there is only one: everything is a jealous mistress, everything is terribly possessive, and, by God, we want to be terribly possessed if we want to get somewhere - and we want to be terribly possessed - anyhow; or what is life?

And gold has no name, it licks the hand of anyone who has it: good dog!

We are primitive men; we taboo what we desire and need. How did the denying of love come to be associated with the idea of morality.

Socialist writers are made of sterner stuff than those who only let their characters steeplechase through trouble in order to comeout first in the happy ending of moral uplift.

Each Australian is a Ulysses.

Anyone would think a thin stick like me, weak and miserable, would go down with everything: do you think I get more than my old cough every winter? I bet I live till ninety, with all my aches and pains. To think that's fifty more years of the Great-I-Am.

Creation of something out of nothing is the most primitive of human passions and the most optimistic