I get so tired of moral bookkeeping.

Writing does not exclude the full life; it demands it.

All the old houses that I knew when I was a child were full of books, bought generation after generation by members of the family. Nobody told you to read this or not to read that.

It is such a relief to be told the truth.

I am in Paris. Yes ma'am , I made it back. I came up from Berlin, stopped here ten days, fought a losing battle against my deepest inclinations, pulled myself out by the hair and went to Madrid...Madrid is a lovely enchanting city, and there was almost ready for me a kind of penthouse full of sunlight, a roof garden, and so on. I gave one look at it all, returned to the hotel and went to bed and wept bitterly for eleven hours...Why? Because I had seen Paris and could not endure the thought of being anywhere else.

The nose is surely one of the most impressionable, if not positively erotic, of all our unruly members.

Even St. Teresa said, "I can pray better when I'm comfortable," and she refused to wear her haircloth shirt or starve herself. I don't think living in cellars and starving is better for an artist than it is for anybody else.