In times of disorder and stress, the fanatics play a prominent role; in times of peace, the critics. Both are shot after the revolution.

Real genius of moral insight is a motor which will start any engine.

A young poet in America should not be advised at the outset to give up all for the Muse-to seclude himself in the country, to live hand from mouth in Greenwich Village or to escape to the Riviera. I should not advise him even to become a magazine editor or work in a publisher's office. The poet would do better to study a profession, to become a banker or a public official or even to go in for the movies.

They [the English] have a special word, "civil," for what is elsewhere merely ordinary politeness.

All Hollywood corrupts; and absolute Hollywood corrupts absolutely.

I find more and more that I am a man of the 1920s. I still expect something exciting. Drinks, animated conversation, gaiety: the uninhibited exchange of ideas.

It is certainly very hard to write about sex in English without making it unattractive.