Purity engenders Wisdom, Passion avarice, and Ignorance folly, infatuation and darkness.

Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self.

We may assume that we keep people waiting symbolically because we do not wish to see them and that our anxiety is due not to being late, but to having to see them at all.

No one can achieve Serenity until the glare of passion is past the meridian.

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

If one is too lazy to think, too vain to do a thing badly, too cowardly to admit it, one will never attain wisdom.

In the dream of approaching forty I saw myself as about to die and realized that I was no longer myself, but a creature inhabited entirely by parasites, as a caterpillar is occupied by the grubs of the ichneumon fly. Gin, whisky, sloth, fear, guilt, tobacco, had made themselves my inquilines; alcohol sloshed about within, while tendrils of melon and vine grew out of ears and nostrils; my mind was a worn gramophone record, my true self was such a ruin as to seem non-existent, and all this had happened in the last three years.