Nothing is as obnoxious as other people's luck.

So there was not an "I" anymore - not a basis on which I could organize my self-respect - save my limitless capacity for toil that it seemed I possessed no more.

Having once found the intensity of art, nothing else that can happen in life can ever again seem as important as the creative process.

A love affair is like a short story--it has a beginning, a middle, and an end. The beginning was easy, the middle might drag, invaded by commonplace, but the end, instead of being decisive and well knit with that element of revelatory surprise as a well-written story should be, it usually dissipated in a succession of messy and humiliating anticlimaxes.

The lights grow brighter as the earth lurches away from the sun.

When people are taken out of their depths they lose their heads, no matter how charming a bluff they may put up.

It's a mining town in lotus land.