The past is the only dead thing that smells sweet.

The only way for writers to meet is to share a quick peek over a common lamp-post.

Dining out is a vice, a dissipation of spirit punished by remorse. We eat, drink, and talk a little too much, abuse all our friends, belch out our literary preferences and are egged on by accomplices in the audience to acts of mental exhibitionism. Such evenings cannot fail to diminish those who take part in them. They end on Monkey Hill.

There are only three things which make life worth living: to be writing a tolerably good book, to be in a dinner party of six, and to be traveling south with someone whom your conscience permits you to love.

When I write after dark the shades of evening scatter their purple through my prose.

In youth the life of reason is not in itself sufficient; afterwards the life of emotion, except for short periods, becomes unbearable.

Imagination is nostalgia for the past, the absent it is the liquid solution in which art develops the snapshot of reality.