You have to have something vicious in you to be a creative writersomething old-adamish, incompatible to the "ordinary world.

They say geniuses mostly have great mothers. They mostly have sad fates.

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

The Sphinx-riddle. Solve it, or be torn to bits, is the decree.

I'd wipe the machines off the face of the earth again, and end the industrial epoch absolutely, like a black mistake.

A man must keep his earnestness nimble, to escape ridicule.

But that is how men are! Ungrateful and never satisfied. When you don't have them they hate you because you won't; and when you do have them they hate you again, for some other reason. Or for no reason at all, except that they are discontented children, and can't be satisfied whatever they get, let a woman do what she may.