Most of the beauty of women evaporates when they achieve domestic happiness at the price of their independence.

There cannot be a personal God without a pessimistic religion. As soon as there is a personal God he is a disappointing God.

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

Obesity is a mental state, a disease brought on by boredom and disappointment.

Beneath a mask of selfish tranquility nothing exists except bitterness and boredom. I am one of those whom suffering has made empty and frivolous: each night in my dreams I pull the scab off a wound; each day, vacuous and habit-ridden, I help it re-form.

I review novels to make money, because it is easier for a sluggard to write an article a fortnight than a book a year, because the writer is soothed by the opiate of action, the crank by posing as a good journalist, and having an air hole. I dislike it. I do it and I am always resolving to give it up.

Hemingway is great in that alone of living writers he has saturated his work with the memory of physical pleasure, with sunshine and salt water, with food, wine and making love and the remorse which is the shadow of that sun.