One cannot lay a foundation by scattering stones, nor is a reputation for good work to be got by strewing volumes about the world.

O God, let me write books! Please, God, let me write books!

What fools people are when they think they can make two lives belong together by saying words over them.

It is easy to convince a man who already thinks as you do.

No matter how vital experience might be while you lived it, no sooner was it ended and dead than it became as lifeless as the piles of dry dust in a school history book.

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.

a self-made martyr is a poor thing.