I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others--young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life.

One writes of scars healed, a loose parallel to the pathology of the skin, but there is no such thing in the life of an individual.

Learn young about hard work and manners - and you'll be through the whole dirty mess and nicely dead again before you know it.

The extraordinary thing is not that people in a lifetime turn out worse or better than we had prophesied; particularly in America that is to be expected. The extraordinary thing is how people keep their levels, fulfill their promises, seem actually buoyed up by an inevitable destiny.

I am not a great man, but sometimes I think the impersonal and objective equality of my talent and the sacrifices of it, in pieces, to preserve its essential value has some sort of epic grandeur.

You're a slave, a bound helpless slave to one thing in the world, your imagination.

I don't want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again.