I should like to bury something precious in every place where I've been happy and then, when I'm old and ugly and miserable, I could come back and dig it up and remember.

I did not know it was possible to be so miserable and live but I am told that this is a common experience.

If every museum in the New World were emptied, if every famous building in the Old World were destroyed and only Venice saved, there would be enough there to fill a full lifetime with delight. Venice, with all its complexity and variety, is in itself the greatest surviving work of art in the world.

Words have basic inalienable meanings, departure from which is either conscious metaphor or inexcusable vulgarity.

He wasn't a complete human being at all. He was a tiny bit of one, unnaturally developed; something in a bottle, an organ kept alive in a laboratory. I thought he was a sort of primitive savage, but he was something absolutely modern and up-to-date that only this ghastly age could produce. A tiny bit of a man pretending to be whole.

I do not believe the expenditure of $2.50 for a book entitles the purchaser to the personal friendship of the author.

If a thing's worth doing at all, it's worth doing well.