Love him and let him love you. Do you think anything else under heaven really matters?

And I was yet aware that this was only a moment, that the world waited outside, as hungry as a tiger, and that trouble stretched above us, longer than the sky.

When you're writing you're trying to find out something which you don't know.

In my case, I think my exile saved my life, for it inexorably confirmed something which Americans appear to have great difficulty accepting. Which is, simply, this: a man is not a man until he is able and willing to accept his own vision of the world, no matter how radically this vision departs from others.

The male cannot bear very much humiliation; and he really cannot bear it, it obliterates him.

The price one pays for pursuing any profession or calling is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side.

It is a very grave matter to be forced to imitate a people for whom you know-which is the price of your performance and survival-you do not exist. It is hard to imitate a people whose existence appears, mainly, to be made tolerable by their bottomless gratitude that they are not, thank heaven, you.