Words, like acts, become stale when they are repeated.

Youth is the period of harsh judgments, and a man seldom learns until he reaches thirty that human nature is made up not of simples, but of compounds.

It is human nature to overestimate the thing you've never had.

Nothing, except the weather report or a general maxim of conduct, is so unsafe to rely upon as a theory of fiction.

Conscience represents a fetich to which good people sacrifice their own happiness, bad people their neighbors'.

... to be "literary" appeared to my deluded innocence as an unending romance.

The attraction of horror is a mental, or even an intellectual, excitement, but the fascination of the repulsive, so noticeable incontemporary writing, can spring openly from some rotted substance within our civilization.