Switch clicking off in my head, turning the hot light off and the cool night on and — [He looks up, smiling sadly.] — all of a sudden there's—peace!

Bohemia has no banner. It survives by discretion.

Time rushes towards us with its hospital tray of infinitely varied narcotics, even while it is preparing us for its inevitably fatal operation.

And it was about then, about that time, that I began to find life unsatisfactory as an explanation of itself and was forced to adopt the method of the artist of not explaining but putting the blocks together in some other way that seems more significant to him. Which is a rather fancy way of saying I started writing.

There is no pleasure in the world like writing well and going fast.

Make voyages. Attempt them. There's nothing else.

The nervous system of any age or nation is its creative workers, its artists. And if that nervous system is profoundly disturbed by its environment, the work it produces will inescapably reflect the disturbances, sometimes obliquely and sometimes with violent directness.