After all, the world is not a stage-not to me: nor a theatre: nor a show-house of any sort. And art, especially novels, are not little theatres where the reader sits aloft and watches...and sighs, commiserates, condones and smiles. That's what you want a book to be: because it leaves you so safe and superior, with your two-dollar ticket to the show. And that's what my books are not and never will be...Whoever reads me will be in the thick of the scrimmage, and if he doesn't like it if he wants a safe seat in the audience-let him read someone else.

I've never seen a wild thing feel sorry for itself.

Never was an age more sentimental, more devoid of real feeling, more exaggerated in false feeling, than our own.

Sex and beauty are inseparable, like life and consciousness. And the intelligence which goes with sex and beauty, and arises out of sex and beauty, is intuition." "And they rock, and they rock, through the sensual ageless ages on the depths of the seven seas, and through the salt they reel with drunken delight and in the tropics tremble they with love and roll with massive, strong desire, like gods.

And what's romance? Usually, a nice little tale where you have everything As You Like It, where rain never wets your jacket and gnats never bite your nose and it's always daisy-time.

If only I am keen and hard like the sheer tip of a wedge Driven by invisible blows, The rock will split, we shall come at the wonder, we shall find the Hesperides.

With a woman, a man always wants to let himself go. And it is precisely with a woman that he should never let himself go ... but stick to his innermost belief and meet her just there.