He had angered Providence by resisting too many temptations. There was nothing left but heaven, where he would meet only those who, like him, had wasted earth.

Art isn't meaningless... It is in itself. It isn't in that it tries to make life less so.

I avoided writers very carefully because they can perpetuate trouble as no one else can.

He's a bootlegger....One time he killed a man who found out that he was nephew to Von Hindenburg and second cousin to the devil.

It was always the becoming he dreamed of, never the being.

Later she remembered all the hours of the afternoon as happy -- one of those uneventful times that seem at the moment only a link between past and future pleasure, but turn out to have been the pleasure itself.

It's just because I love the past that I want this house to look back on its glamourous moment of youth and beauty, and I want its stairs to creak as if to the footsteps of women with hoop skirts and men in boots and spurs. But they've made it into a blondined, rouged-up old woman of sixty.