I might have enjoyed the company of a woman or two... Or three but that had never stopped me from loving you.

Don't let yourself feel worthless: often through life you will really be at your worst when you seem to think best of yourself; and don't worry about losing your "personality," as you persist in calling it: at fifteen you had the radiance of early morning, at twenty you will begin to have the melancholy brilliance of the moon, and when you are my age you will give out, as I do, the genial golden warmth of 4 p.m.

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

Intelligence is a mere instrument of circumstances.

What people are ashamed of usually makes a good story.

Speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again.

I have asked a lot of my emotions-one hundred and twenty stories. The price was high, right up with Kipling, because there was one little drop of something, not blood, not a tear, not my seed, but me more intimately than these, in every story, it was the extra I had. Now it has gone and I am just like you now.