Sometimes when I think how good my book can be, I can hardly breathe.

Friendship is a pretty full-time occupation if you really are friendly with somebody. You can't have too many friends because then you're just not really friends.

Yes: but aren't love and marriage notoriously synonymous in the minds of most women? Certainly very few men get the first without promising the second: love, that is--if it's just a matter of spreading her legs, almost any woman will do that for nothing.

Good writing is rewriting.

A disquieting loneliness came into my life, but it induced no hunger for friends of longer acquaintance: they seemed now like a salt-free, sugarless diet.

Poor slob without a name. It's a little inconvenient, his not having a name. But I haven't the right to give him one: he'll have to wait until he belongs to somebody. We just sort of took up by the river one day, we don't belong to each other: he's an independent, and so am I. I don't want to own anything until I know I've found the place where me and things belong together.

When God hands you a gift, he also hands you a whip; and the whip is intended for self-flagellation solely.