At any rate, when a subject is highly controversial-and any question about sex is that-one cannot hope to tell the truth. One can only show how one came to hold whatever opinion one does hold.

Of course, literature is the only spiritual and humane career. Even painting tends to dumness, and music turns people erotic, whereas the more you write the nicer you become.

The poet is always our contemporary.

Human beings have neither kindness, nor faith, nor charity beyond what serves to increase the pleasure of the moment.

One must love everything.

I got out this diary, & read as one always does read one's own writing, with a kind of guilty intensity.

All extremes of feeling are allied to madness.