First impressions are often signals from the deep that we should credit oftener than we do.

You do not create a style. You work, and develop yourself; your style is an emanation from your own being.

In the arts, you simply cannot secure your bread and your freedom of action too. You cannot be a hostile critic of society and expect society to feed you regularly.

Human life itself may be almost pure chaos, but the work of the artist is to take these handfuls of confusion and disparate things, things that seem to be irreconcilable, and put them together in a frame to give them some kind of shape and meaning.

Death is loneliness in its purest form.

advance money is really a delusion, that is to say, I get no more until it is paid out in sales, but still, living from hand to mouth and day to day as I do, a nickel in the hand is more useful than the same nickel next year. What do I know about next year? I've never been there. I don't know any one who has.

I will never again attempt to tell any young person what to do - the really gifted don't need advice and the others can't take it.