Wine is poetry in a bottle.

Insomnia is a gross feeder. It will nourish itself on any kind of thinking, including thinking about not thinking.

We prefer to think that the absence of inverted commas guarantees the originality of a thought, whereas it may be merely that the utterer has forgotten its source.

Seriously, I do not know what to say of this book [ Absalom, Absalom!] except that it seem to point to the final blowup of what was once a remarkable, if minor, talent… this is a penny dreadful tricked up in fancy language and given a specious depth by the expert manipulation of a series of eccentric technical tricks. The characters have no magnitude and no meaning because they have no more reality than a mince-pie nightmare.

One newspaper a day ought to be enough for anyone who still prefers to retain a little mental balance.

To read in bed is to draw around us invisible, noiseless curtains. Then at last we are in a room of our own and are ready to burrow back, back to that private life of the imagination we all led as a child and to whose secret satisfactions so many of us have mislaid the key.

A man who is careful with his palate is not likely to be careless with his paragraphs.