Are you willing to be sponged out, erased, cancelled, made nothing? Are you willing to be made nothing? Dipped into oblivion? If not, you will never really change.

That was the birth of sin. Not doing it, but KNOWING about it. Before the apple, [Adam and Eve] had shut their eyes and their minds had gone dark. Now, they peeped and pried and imagined. They watched themselves.

An artist is only an ordinary man with a greater potentiality.

A man has no religion who has not slowly and painfully gathered one together, adding to it, shaping it; and one's religion is never complete and final, it seems, but must always be undergoing modification.

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

I always feel as if I stood naked for the fire of Almighty God to go through me--and it's rather an awful feeling. One has to be so terribly religious to be an artist.

Nobody can have the soul of me. My mother has had, and nobody can have it again. Nobody can come into my very self again, and breathe me like an atmosphere.