He did not say that because he knew that if you said a good thing it might not happen.

I would not have thought of eating a meal without drinking a beer.

Decadence is a difficult word to use since it has become little more than a term of abuse applied by critics to anything they do not yet understand or which seems to differ from their moral concepts.

To hell with them. Nothing hurts if you don't let it.

I decided that I would write one story about each thing that I knew about.

I spend a hell of a lot of time killing animals and fish so I wouldn't kill myself. When a man is in rebellion against death, as I am in rebellion against death, he gets pleasure out of taking to himself one of the godlike attributes; that of giving it.

You see I'm trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across, not just to depict life, or criticize it, but to actually make it alive.