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.

Promise is the capacity for letting people down.

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.

The worst vice of the solitary is the worship of his food.

In America every woman has her set of girl-friends; some are cousins, the rest are gained at school. These form a permanent committee who sit on each other's affairs, who come out together, marry and divorce together, and who end as those groups of bustling, heartless well-informed club-women who govern society. Against them the Couple of Ehepaar is helpless and Man in their eyes but a biological interlude.

We fear something before we hate.

The true work of art is the one which the seventh wave of genius throws up the beach where the undertow of time cannot drag it back.