My mother was dead for five years before I knew that I had loved her very much.

failure in the theater is more public, more brilliant, more unreal than in any other field.

Intellectuals can tell themselves anything, sell themselves any bill of goods, which is why they were so often patsies for the ruling classes in 19th-century France and England, or 20th-century Russia and America.

The past, with its pleasures, its rewards, its foolishness, its punishments, is there for each of us forever, and it should be.

Nothing you write, if you hope to be good, will ever come out as you first hoped.

Success isn't everything but it makes a man stand straight.

Lonely people, in talking to each other can make each other lonelier.