Succeed! It has been done, and with a stupidity that can astound the most experienced.

Yes, success is everything. Failure is more common. Most achieve a sort of middling thing, but fortunately one's situation is always blurred, you never know absolutely quite where you are.

I don’t think you can talk about progress in art—movement, but not progress.

There is no moment that exceeds in beauty that moment when one looks at a woman and finds that she is looking at you in the same way that you are looking at her. The moment in which she bestows that look that says, "Proceed with your evil plan, sumbitch.

Endings are elusive, middles are nowhere to be found, but worst of all is to begin, to begin, to begin.

Art is not difficult because it wishes to be difficult, but because it wishes to be art.

Faint equivalents can sometimes be found ... . Or it can be rendered obliquely-an adolescent's mental image of his or her parents making love, which must be something on the order of crocodiles mating.