Like water, we are truest to our nature in repose.

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.

The secret of success is to be in harmony with existence, to be always calm to let each wave of life wash us a little farther up the shore.

As repressed sadists are supposed to become policemen or butchers so those with an irrational fear of life become publishers.

Green leaves on a dead tree is our epitaph-green leaves, dear reader, on a dead tree.

A writer is in danger of allowing his talent to dull who lets more than a year go past without finding himself in his rightful place of composition, the small single unluxurious retreat of the twentieth century, the hotel bedroom.

Words today are like the shells and rope of seaweed which a child brings home glistening from the beach and which in an hour have lost their luster.