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

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

Fallen leaves lying on the grass in the November sun bring more happiness than the daffodils.

The true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and no other task is of any consequence.

No one over thirty-five is worth meeting who has not something to teach us, something more than we could learn for ourselves, from a book.

Optimism and self-pity are the positive and negative poles of modern cowardice.

A lazy person, whatever the talents with which he set out, will have condemned himself to second-hand thoughts and to second-rate friends.