Customs and convictions change; respectable people are the last to know, or to admit, the change, and the ones most offended by fresh reflections of the facts in the mirror of art.

What would men be without women? Scarce, sir, mighty scarce. Mark Twain Women are an alien race set down among us.

Each day, we wake slightly altered, and the person we were yesterday is dead. So why, one could say, be afraid of death, when death comes all the time?

Writing doesn't require drive. It's like saying a chicken has to have drive to lay an egg.

But it seems to me that once you begin a gesture it's fatal not to go through with it.

What more fiendish proof of cosmic irresponsibility than a Nature which, having invented sex as a way to mix genes, then permits to arise, amid all its perfumed and hypnotic inducements to mate, a tireless tribe of spirochetes and viruses that torture and kill us for following orders?

A writer's self-consciousness, for which he is much scorned, is really a mode of interestedness, that inevitably turns outward.