Apuleius married a rich widow, then wrote _The Golden Ass_.

Great art is indefinable but that's all right; it exists anyway.

My notion of a great novel is something like a five-hundred-page shaggy-dog story, with only the punch line omitted.

Literature, like anything else, can become a wearisome business if you make a lifetime specialty of it. A healthy, wholesome man would no more spend his entire life reading great books than he would packing cookies for Nabisco.

The Proustian aquarium: grotesque and gorgeous fish drifting with languid fins through a subaqueous medium of pale violet polluted ink.

The ideal kitchen-sink novel: Throw in everything but the kitchen sink. Then add the kitchen sink.

This is the most beautiful place on Earth. There are many such places. Every man, every woman, carries in heart and mind the image of the ideal place, the right place, the one true home, known or unknown, actual or visionary.