I never knew of a morning in Africa when I woke that I was not happy.

Madame, all stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true-story teller who would keep that from you.

The only kind of writing is rewriting.

The one who is doing his work and getting satisfaction from it is not the one the poverty bothers.

As a writer, you should not judge, you should understand.

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.

I am opposed to writing about the private lives of living authors and psychoanalyzing them while they are alive. Criticism is getting all mixed up with a combination of the Junior FBI-men, discards from Freud and Jung and a sort of Columnist peep-hole and missing laundry list school. ... Every young English professor sees gold in them dirty sheets now. Imagine what they can do with the soiled sheets of four legal beds by the same writer and you can see why their tongues are slavering.