It is not merely enough to have the ability to be persistant, you must also have the ability to start over.

He's so dumb he doesn't know he's alive.

Beauty and love pass, I know... Oh, there's sadness, too. I suppose all great happiness is a little sad. Beauty means the scent of roses and then the death of roses-

I have lived hard and ruined the essential innocence [sic] in myself that could make it that possible [sic], and the fact that I have abused liquor is something to be paid for with suffering and death perhaps but not renunciation.

You are the finest, loveliest, tenderest, and most beautiful person I have ever known—and even that is an understatement.

Reporting the extreme things as if they were the average things will start you on the art of fiction.

The transition from libertine to prig was so complete.