I do not understand the world, but I watch it's progress.

Mexican writer and diplomat, "Pasado en claro" ("A Draft of Shadows") You learn something the day you die. You learn how to die.

We pity people too often for the wrong reasons.

[On Gertrude Stein's Making of Americans:] I doubt if all the people who should read it will read it for a great while yet, for it is in such a limited edition, and reading it is anyhow a sort of permanent occupation.

I love to praise what I love, and I won't for a minute believe that love is blind -- indeed, it gives clearness without sharpness, and surely that is the best light in which to look at anything.

A story is like something you wind out of yourself. Like a spider, it is a web you weave, and you love your story like a child.

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.