What a man does for pay is of little significance. What he is, as a sensitive instrument responsive to the world's beauty, is everything!

The cat is cryptic, and close to strange things which men cannot see.

We shall see that at which dogs howl in the dark, and that at which cats prick up their ears after midnight.

I am, indeed, an absolute materialist so far as actual belief goes; with not a shred of credence in any form of supernaturalism—religion, spiritualism, transcendentalism, metempsychosis, or immortality.

I am writing this under an appreciable mental strain, since by tonight I shall be no more. Penniless, and at the end of my supply of the drug which alone makes life endurable, I can bear the torture no longer; and shall cast myself from this garret window into the squalid street below.

If I am mad, it is mercy! May the gods pity the man who in his callousness can remain sane to the hideous end!

At night, when the objective world has slunk back into its cavern and left dreamers to their own, there come inspirations and capabilities impossible at any less magical and quiet hour. No one knows whether or not he is a writer unless he has tried writing at night.