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.

Most people do not believe in anything very much and our greatest poetry is given to us by those who do.

Slums may well be breeding grounds of crime, but middle class suburbs are incubators of apathy and delirium.

A mutually fulfilled sexual union between two people is the rarest sensation which life can provide. But it is not quite real. It stops when the telephone rings. Such a passion can be kept at its early strength only by adding to it either more and more unhappiness (jealousy, separation, doubt, renunciation), or more and more artificiality (drink, technique, stage-illusions). Whoever has missed this has never lived, who lives for it alone is but partly alive.

The friendships which last are those wherein each friend respects the other's dignity to the point of not really wanting anything from him.

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

The river of truth is always splitting up into arms that reunite. Islanded between them, the inhabitants argue for a lifetime as to which is the mainstream.