There is a brief time for sex, and a long time when sex is out of place. But when it is out of place as an activity there still should be the large and quiet space in the consciousness where it lives quiescent. Old people can have a lovely quiescent sort of sex, like apples, leaving the young quite free for their sort.

I never know when I sit down, just what I am going to write. I make no plan; it just comes, and I don't know where it comes from.

To the Puritan all things are impure, as somebody says.

Instead of chopping yourself down to fit the world, chop the world down to fit yourself.

My God, what a clumsy olla putrida James Joyce is! Nothing but old fags and cabbage stumps of quotations from the Bible and the rest, stewed in the juice of deliberate, journalistic dirty-mindedness—what old and hard-worked staleness, masquerading as the all-new!

Poe tried alcohol, and any drug he could lay his hands on. He also tried any human being he could lay his hands on.

Literature is a toil and a snare, a curse that bites deep.