...I had grown up in a world that was dominated by immature age. Not by vigorous immaturity, but by immaturity that was old and tired and prudent, that loved ritual and rubric, and was utterly wanting in curiosity about the new and the strange. Its era has passed away, and the world it made has crumbled around us. Its finest creation, a code of manners, has been ridiculed and discarded.

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

... beauty, like ecstasy, has always been hostile to the commonplace. And the commonplace, under its popular label of the normal,has been the supreme authority for Homo sapiens since the days when he was probably arboreal.

Violence commands both literature and life, and violence is always crude and distorted.

Life may take away happiness. But it can't take away having had it.

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

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