What happens is not as important as how you react to what happens.

No one in the modern world is more lonely than the writer with a literary conscience.

it is wiser to be conventionally immoral than unconventionally moral. It isn't the immorality they object to, but the originality.

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

I had no place in any coterie, or in any reciprocal self-advertising. I stood alone. I stood outside. I wanted only to learn. I wanted only to write better.

Cruelty is the only sin.