All novelists should live in two different worlds: a real one and an unreal one.

Only one same reason is shared by all of us: we wish to create worlds as real as, but other than the world that is. Or was. This is why we cannot plan. We know a world is an organism, not a machine. We also know that a genuinely created world must be independent of its creator; a planned world (a world that fully reveals its planning) is a dead world. It is only when our characters and events begin to disobey us that they begin to live.

To write poetry and to commit suicide, apparently so contradictory, had really been the same, attempts at escape.

If you want to be true to life, start lying about it

You come to the United States not knowing what to expect. Then all your worst prejudices are confirmed.

Each age, each guilty age, builds high walls around its Versailles; and personally I hate those walls most when they are made by literature and art.

Wealth is a monster. It takes a month to learn to control it financially. And many years to learn to control it psychologically.