You must squeeze out of yourself every sensation, every thought, every image, - mercilessly, without reserve and without remorse: you must search the darkest corners of your heart, the most remote recesses of your brain, - you must search them for the image, for the glamour, for the right expression. And you must do it sincerely, at any cost: you must do it so that at the end of your day's work you should feel exhausted, emptied of every sensation and every thought, with a blank mind and an aching heart, with the notion that there is nothing, - nothing left in you.

Even extreme grief may ultimately vent itself in violence--but more generally takes the form of apathy

I don't like work... but I like what is in work - the chance to find yourself. Your own reality - for yourself, not for others - which no other man can ever know.

An artist is a man of action, whether he creates a personality, invents an expedient, or finds the issue of a complicated situation.

Writing in English is like throwing mud at a wall.

You can't, in sound morals, condemn a man for taking care of his own integrity. It is his clear duty.

Vanity plays lurid tricks with our memory, and the truth of every passion wants some pretence to make it live.