The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story.

For we each of us deserve everything, every luxury that was ever piled in the tombs of the dead Kings, and we each of us deserve nothing, not a mouthful of bread in hunger. Have we not eaten while another starved? Will you punish us for that? Will you reward us for the virtue of starving while others ate? No man earns punishment, no man earns reward. Free your mind of the idea of deserving, the idea of earning, and you will begin to be able to think.

The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.

In so far as one denies what is, one is possessed by what is not, the compulsions, the fantasies, the terrors that flock to fill the void.

As a man's real power grows and his knowledge widens, ever the way he can follow grows narrower: until at last he chooses nothing,but does only and wholly what he must do.

Art is action. The way I live my life to its highest degree is by writing, the practice of art.

Paradise is for those who make paradise.