Every author, however modest, keeps a most outrageous vanity chained like a madman in the padded cell of his breast.

If it's to be, it's up to me.

How can they say my life is not a success? Have I not for more than sixty years got enough to eat and escaped being eaten?

Solvency is entirely a matter of temperament and not of income.

There is more felicity on the far side of baldness than young men can possibly imagine.

The notion of making money by popular work, and then retiring to do good work, is the most familiar of all the devil's traps for artists.

But why wasn't I born, alas, in an age of Adjectives; why can one no longer write of silver-shedding Tears and moon-tailed Peacocks, of eloquent Death, of the Negro and star-enameled Night?