The best of America drifts to Paris. The American in Paris is the best American.

Poetry is either something that lives like fire inside you

Any person with any imagination is bound to be afraid.

At any rate, let us love for a while, for a year or so, you and me. That's a form of divine drunkenness that we can all try. There are only diamonds in the whole world, diamonds and perhaps the shabby gift of disillusion.

He was resentful against all those in authority over him, and this, combined with a lazy indifference toward his work, exasperated every master in school. He grew discouraged and imagined himself a pariah; took to sulking in corners and reading after lights. With a dread of being alone he attached a few friends, but since they were not among the elite of the school, he used them simply as mirrors of himself, audiences before which he might do that posing absolutely essential to him. He was unbearably lonely, desperately unhappy.

He had no plans, no definite intentions, except to kiss her lips again, to hold her in his arms.

Nobody ever became a writer just by wanting to be one.